Helen Raleigh of the Federalist pours through new numbers and finds disturbing news about the communist Chinese government’s demographic policies.
A new report from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute reveals chilling evidence of the Chinese Communist Party’s genocide of Uighur Muslims and other minorities in Xinjiang, China. One key — and chilling — finding is that between 2019-2020, Uighur and other minority-concentrated areas saw birth rates plummet 50 percent or more within those two years.
As the report points out, “The Chinese Communist Party has a long history of state-directed demographic engineering” in the name of “family planning.” For example, between 1979 and 2015, the CCP imposed a “One-Child” policy on the Chinese population, limiting Chinese couples to a single child. The policy was deeply unpopular and brutally enforced — forced abortion, sterilization, and hefty fines were standard punishments for couples who violated the government mandate.
Curiously, the CCP targeted its policy mostly at Han Chinese, the largest ethnic group in China representing more than 90 percent of China’s population, while permitting ethnic minority couples in China to have more than one child during this period.
Even as the CCP patted its own back for successfully preventing more than 400 million births, it eventually realized by 2014 that the “One-Child” policy caused a looming population crisis. China now faces a sexes imbalance — men outnumber women by 33 million, which has driven human trafficking of women and girls from neighboring countries.
Indeed, the Chinese population is aging fast while its workforce has begun to decline. China’s most recent census shows that, compared to a decade ago, China’s workforce dropped 7 percent to 63.3 percent, while those 60 and older rose 5.4 percent to almost 20 percent.
As its large pool of young and affordable workers were the key drivers of its three decades of breakneck economic growth, a shrinking workforce and an aging population pose severe challenges for China.
