Plant children or sow disaster

For thousands of years, China carried the flame of a formidable natural law tradition. Under the rule of the all-powerful communist government, that tradition has been undermined. Recent headlines witness the radical consequences of the Chinese Communist Party’s social engineering. Like many communist nations, China ran authoritarian experiments on the family and the natural order. Due to the demographic crisis set in motion by its one-child policy almost half a century ago, China will no longer allow for the international adoption of Chinese children.

Once the most populous nation in the world with 1.4 billion people, China has been slipping in size since 2022. While still massive compared to the United States (with a population less than a quarter of China’s), this decline allowed India to surpass China as the most populous nation in 2023. According to projections, China could shrink by 100 million in the next few decades and lose nearly half its population by 2100.

Recognizing this reality back in 2015, China replaced its one-child policy with a two-child one. But by then, cultural attitudes were baked in and the damage appeared to be irreversible. Grasping at straws, the CCP allowed for three-child families in 2021 and is now banning international adoption—efforts that will most likely prove similarly futile. Once opened, Pandora’s box is not easily shut again.

After all, the one-child policy had, in a certain sense, “succeeded.” The CCP’s central planners’ reckless ambition was to slow population growth for the sake of economic growth. And they got what they wanted: China’s economy soared, growing from roughly the size of Canada’s in the 1960s and 1970s to overtaking the United States in 2016 as the world’s largest economy, according to one measure. All that it took was casting away tens of millions of children (most of them girls) through abortion, infanticide, and (more humanely) through adoption.

Os Guinness, the son of Christian missionaries, lived through the Chinese Communist Revolution of 1949. It was “anti-biblical, anti-Christian, anti-religious,” he observed. But, perhaps as importantly, it was anti-natural. It rejected not only the Christian tradition but all traditions. According to The Economist, Mao Zedong’s revolution “manifested itself in violence against anything that predated the party’s ascendancy.” Confucius’ tomb was blown up and traditional writings were banned and burned.

But China had existed far longer as a traditional civilization than it has under a communist regime. Even today, those who would be wise still find proverbial insight into China’s past, from Confucius’ Analects to Sun Tzu’s Art of War.

In 1943, when C.S. Lewis was searching for a shorthand for the natural law that all civilizations must recognize if they are to survive for long, it is unsurprising that he would settle for the Chinese concept of the Tao. And, although the communist revolution would not sweep China for another six years, Lewis’ words in The Abolition of Man look prescient: “The Rebellion of new ideologies against the Tao is a rebellion of the branches against the tree: if the rebels could succeed they would find that they had destroyed themselves.”

The moral order of the universe, as the Chinese Communist Party is painfully and all-too-slowly discovering, is not a set of suggestions for enlightened living. It is an iron law with fearsome consequences. It is not only nature’s law but God’s as nature’s Creator. And as Paul warned the Galatians: “God is not mocked, for whatever one sows, that will he also reap.” So, too, it seems, do nations.

A proverb often attributed to Confucius—perhaps one of those banned in the early decades of the Chinese Revolution—says that those planning for the year ahead should plant rice, those planning for 10 years should plant trees, and those planning 100 years should “plant” children. In this, China failed to follow the Tao: planting industry and economic growth when it should have been planting children—even putting these over the lives of flesh-and-blood children, born and unborn.

As a consequence, China will spend the coming century fighting an uphill battle against civilizational decline. As elderly Chinese citizens look to retire, there will be fewer children to care for them in their old age. There will be fewer adults to replace them in the workforce and pay for their retirement. And as young bachelors look to marry and raise up the next generation of Chinese, it will be harder than ever to find a wife among the millions lost to abortion, infanticide, and adoption.

This is what happens when a nation turns its back on the natural law. Eventually, this pattern will threaten the very existence of China as a great civilization.