Human beings have kind of always treated everything like a race, or a competition, between countries and people.
It must be deep in our nature, which means that hearing that China is struggling with at least one thing probably makes Westerners feel the slightest bit gratified.
The thing is, when it comes to the health of the planet, we’ve all really been in this together.
The bit of data that we’re talking about has to do with their birth rate – and the fact that it made a sharp decline between 2022 and 2023.
In 2022, 9.56 million babies were born to the 1.4 billion residents of China.
In 2023, that number dropped to 7.88 million.
There’s a dark economic cloud hovering over the country, which is likely why the government scrubbed these figures from the website where they were originally published after just a few minutes.
In the 1970s, the ruling Communist Party in China instituted the famed “one child policy” in an attempt to control their booming population. That policy was revised in 2016, but these numbers suggest numbers are continuing to drop precipitously.
This is combined with a faltering economy and high unemployment rate, which explains a lot; no one who doesn’t have a good job is going to want to add (more) kids to the mix.
Of course, China is not alone with this startling issue.
Japan has been experiencing population drops for years, and places like Taiwan, Russia, Europe, and even America are contributing to what can only be called a global trend.
University of Maryland professor Philip Cohen has gone on record saying “people, especially women, have more lucrative things to do,” than have babies and raise children.
Other suppositions are that babies are too expensive, the economy is too volatile, climate change is too unpredictable, or they just plain don’t want to.
On the other side of the spectrum, many countries in Africa are on an opposite trajectory.
Women in Niger are having 6.73 children apiece, and some wonder if Africa could be the new hub of education, entrepreneurship, and cultural importance as these millions of kids come of age.
Could Africa be the new China?
We’re going to have to wait and see, but we have time since there aren’t too many kids around begging for our attention.
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