Will Tomorrow’s Chinese Be Born in a Lab?

Children paint on a plastic sheet at a park on International Children's Day in Haian, Jiangsu Province, China, on June 1, 2022. (STR/AFP via Getty Images)

Commentary

Last fall, Xi Jinping, leader of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), announced that Chinese women must have babies, or, as he put it, begin a “new trend of family” in China.

In fact, the CCP is having a difficult time persuading the people it rules over to bring more Chinese into the world.

There is plenty of irony to be noted here. First, babies are one of life’s great joys; at least, they used to be. The CCP successfully ruined that experience, unless the Chinese people simply forgot how. Then there is the fact that China has about 1.4 billion people, rivaled only by India. The irony is that China’s population may be half of that sooner than later. That dreary statistic, too, is on the CCP.

Even though the one-child policy that began in 1979 was ended by 2015, by then, the cultural demographic damage had been done. Two generations had endured state-enforced abortions, abandoned children, and experienced other anti-human behavior at the hands of the CCP.

By the 1990s and thereafter, when Chinese people got a taste of a higher standard of living, the idea of having more than one child, or any, soured with the population. The thinking went along the lines of, “Why have children when you can have a BMW?”

Fewer Births Than Deaths Since the Great Famine

Furthermore, just as the CCP is responsible for the collapsing Chinese population, it must be noted that it is entirely responsible for China’s fast-aging and highly burdensome population of senior citizens. Today, China has the largest population of old people on Earth, numbering 254 million older than 60 in 2019. That population is expected to rise to more than 400 million, or 30 percent of the entire population, by 2035. That’s 400 million old folks who will require more medical care and other expensive social services. To pay that bill, the CCP will be relying on the taxes of a working population that will be almost half of what it is today.

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The birthrate tells a big part of the story. In 2021, just 12 million babies were born in China, down from 18 million in 2016. For the first time since 1961, deaths outnumbered births in China. In just one year, China’s population fell by 850,000; by 2100, its population could be just one-third of what it is today.

Young People Don’t Want Children

The reality is that many Chinese don’t want children precisely because of how the CCP has run the country and still does. State policy has devalued pregnancy, babies, and the family unit since it took over China in 1949 and punished those who did have babies. Traditional values were fiercely mocked and marginalized on a national basis during the Cultural Revolution and for decades thereafter.

Later, as China developed with the deep integration of Western money and technology, its fertility rates fell. Those two factors seemed to work for a decade or two, but it was only the setup for the demographic downturn China is seeing today and into the foreseeable future. This trend is aggravated by the pressures of economic decline, which China is now experiencing. That, too, is a trend that will only worsen.

Consequently, younger Chinese who may want kids are deferring because they can’t afford to take care of them and their aging parents as well. This is not a cultural mood that is likely to change overnight. Today’s generation of young Chinese has no belief in Xi, the Party, or, for that matter, their future. Credibility is in rather short supply in the CCP.

A Disillusioned ‘Last Generation’

In fact, a social media user captured the mood in Chinese society in a post that reads: “In this country, to love your child is to never let him be born in the first place.”

A 26-year-old Chinese woman named Kongkong, who has a good job in research, was quoted by The Guardian in 2021 as saying: “It costs too much to give kids a decent life. The stuff they teach at school is propaganda, so I’d want to send them to an international school or abroad. But I can’t afford that.” Kongkong, who relates to the “last generation“ mood popular among China’s younger generation, swears she will not have children.

The CCP’s response has a comical, cynical, and even diabolical ring to it.

On the comical side, Xi is becoming the 21st century’s baby boom cheerleader, promising lavish weddings to women who get married and praising family values, having babies, and their stabilizing influences on society—the things that the CCP had previously condemned and punished. It’s as if Xi is hoping to reinvent the hollowed-out China he and the Party have created in a kind of “nanny state 2.0.”

But it’s too late for that. The “China that Mao built” is dying a death of its own making, as are most of the countries in the West. China’s is just a bit more dramatic. The one-party state has lost any cultural influence or credibility (even though it controls all media in the country) and must replace it with the more cynical coercion and enforcement that comes naturally to the Party. That will likely go beyond just monitoring menstrual cycles. It will probably resort to more coercion that will only further alienate the young generation and affirm what they already know: that the CCP hates its people.

Enter China’s Human Factory

Will forced pregnancies work?

Will social credit scores be adjusted to account for whether a young woman is pregnant or not?

Perhaps, but it won’t work soon enough, which is why there is speculation that the CCP is considering repopulating China with lab-grown Chinese people.

“Sooner or later, reproduction will be an industrialized process, it’s the only way to maintain a healthy birthrate,” Zhao DaShuai of the People’s Armed Police Propaganda Bureau wrote on X in August 2023.

She posted a picture of a human fetus inside a machine, noting that “the key is to make it state run, ensuring absolute equality in this procedure.”

Given the track record of the state running things in China, is there really anything the Chinese people have to worry about?

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.