How China blew up its own future

A video from Douyin, China's version of TikTok, depicts a skit where an official from the state Birth Encouragement Office yells at a man to have kids, reflecting the current sentiment in China.

China has become very intense about pushing its citizens to have babies, offering subsidies, cash handouts, free childbirth services, free preschool, and bonus points on school entrance exams for second- and third-born kids.

How China government is taxing condoms and birth control pills to encourage Chinese couples to have more unprotected sex.

These pro-natalist policies began two years ago when Xi Jinping declared increasing childbirth rates a matter of national urgency.

China's state media has been bombarding people with messages about their patriotic duty to procreate, and officials are calling young women to encourage pregnancy.

China's population, after centuries of growth, started to decline for the first time in 2022 and is projected to continue dropping until it is half its current size.

As societies get richer, people tend to have fewer babies, a trend observed globally.

As of 1950, the average woman in many countries gave birth about three times, but today it's closer to 1 1/2 births.

A country's population starts to shrink if its birth rate falls below the replacement rate.

After the Great Leap Forward famine, China experienced a huge baby boom with families having seven or more children.

Officials in one city tied up women in hog cages and stacked them on truck beds for forced abortions, performing 19,000 abortions over a 50-day period in that city alone.

China conducted more than 300 million abortions due to the one-child policy.

China's current dependency ratio is 45, which is considered a healthy balance with lots of extra workers and productivity.

China faces a choice between maintaining its current system of single-party rule, autocracy, and rigid nationalism, at the cost of severe demographic decline, or allowing change like immigration to prevent decline at the cost of compromising its political and social system.