China reaps what it sows

China is in the midst of a severe financial crisis, but its financial crisis results from a more profound demographic crisis brought on by its tyrannical one-child policy.

According to the Financial Times, “Beijing’s regulatory blows, targeting sectors from video games to education, have wiped more than $1tn of market value from Chinese equities since their recent peak.”

The immediate triggers were a series of sudden state interventions in the domestic economy—especially an attack on the private education sector. In late July, Chinese regulators announced a sweeping overhaul of the education and tutoring industry that amounts to a form of nationalization: “The regulations will ban companies that teach school curriculum subjects from making profits, raising capital or listing on stock exchanges worldwide, and will prevent them from accepting foreign investment.”

American financial media have covered the fact that these interventions took place, but generally not why. It’s because of China’s demographic crisis. As the paper reported, the changes were “part of the Chinese Communist party’s drive to make raising children and education more affordable and combat a looming population decline that threatens the country’s economic future.”

We cannot overstate the significance of that sentence. This virtual nationalization of the education industry in China is an attempt to engineer the birth of more children by lowering tutoring costs. Why? Because China now realizes that it faces a population implosion. At least one Chinese province saw total births decline by nearly 18% last year. In addition, state media recently reported that nearly 150 cities have now entered a state of “deep aging.” So why did the world’s most populous country find itself sabotaging one of its fastest growing industries in a desperate attempt to increase birth rates?

Much of this can be traced back to the Chinese Communist leadership’s forced abortion policy, a scheme of systemic slaughter devised by terrified tyrants. For decades, the Chinese government made it illegal for most couples to have more than one child. Once implemented, the one-child policy resulted in mass abortions, infanticide, and forced sterilization. The policy was modified in the 1990s to allow families a second child if their first child was a girl. Such is the “kindness” of the Communist Party.

What motivated China to kill incalculable numbers of babies? Communist leaders feared rural population growth. Potential unrest in agricultural areas fueled political concerns, and couples in more rural areas often chose larger families.

Add to this a real estate crisis looming on the horizon. That, too, has its origins in the one-child policy. China has created a sense of prosperity in the same way that tyrants from Nimrod to Pharoah to Herod have done in the past, through massive public works projects.

But as their population ages, the supply of real estate has outpaced demand. Chinese real estate giant Evergrande is over $300 billion in debt, and the phenomenon of “ghost-cities,” dystopian landscapes composed of empty buildings, is well-known. A recent viral video illustrates the point better than words can. Chinese state-owned enterprises built housing structures for tens of millions of people who never even made it to the crib, let alone to their appointed ghost city apartment complexes.

China might think of itself as modern, but its playbook is as old as Genesis. Cain, the founder of the first city, murdered Abel, the shepherd. The builders of the Tower of Babel tried to centralize all authority in one superstructure.

The Communist Party has always been afraid of conservative, ethnic, or religious communities, whether in the 1960s with traditional Chinese farmers or today with the persecuted Muslim and Christian populations.

Tyrants fear those far from the centers of power and slaughter their children because of that fear. Thwarting the Genesis mandate is what tyrants always conspire to do. The CCP convinced itself that fruitfulness and multiplication were dangers when the opposite is true. Someone must do the work and buy the houses. But those someones were killed off by the millions. China’s tyrants now recognize this fact (probably too late) and are firing off an escalating series of desperate policies. Government is designed by God to honor the cycle of family growth and cultural productivity, not to destroy them.