China’s collapse has often been predicted, but for the moment its economy is still going strong. And even as an economic war begins with the United States (or rather the U.S. finally begins fighting back), it will be hard to dislodge its parasitic economy which is wired into much of the world. At least from the outside.
From the inside, it’s another matter.
Many in the foreign policy establishment still see China as another USSR, an evil empire that can be undone by democracy movements and external competition. The last three decades disproved that decisively.
China’s Communist regime isn’t the USSR and it won’t fall to some democracy movement. What will it fall to?
The number of new marriages recorded in China fell to a record low last year, despite sweeping government efforts to encourage young people to tie the knot and have babies to halt demographic decline in the world’s second-largest economy.
Some 6.1 million couples registered their marriages in 2024, a plunge of 20.5% from the previous year, according to data released Saturday by China’s Ministry of Civil Affairs. It marks a record low since the ministry started releasing the statistics in 1986.
Plummeting marriages – and births – pose a severe challenge to Beijing, as it grapples with the pressure of a shrinking workforce and rapidly aging population on the country’s slowing economy.
The sharp drop in the number of marriages in 2024 resumed the decade-long decline since 2013, after a brief rebound in 2023 following the lifting of stringent Covid restrictions.
Last year’s figure was less than half of the 13 million marriages registered at the peak in 2013.
Remember all the jokes about the ‘marching Chinese’. What happened? State population control and consumerism.
The Communist regime taught its people not to have or value children. And then it converted them to its own version of capitalism in which the purpose of life was consumerism. The next generation of the disconnected families it dragged into cities aggressively competes for middle-class status and then uses it to enjoy life.
China is growing older and while it still has a large population, its leaders have crunched the numbers.
Xi has been training to shake up the youth, but that may prove to be no more viable than Putin’s similar efforts in Russia or Japan’s efforts to fix its birth rate.
Tyranny is easy. Culture is hard.
The Chinese people aren’t rebelling against Xi. But there is a kind of Irish Democracy underway in which they show less interest in what their traditional values were supposed to be.
China used consumerism to beat America, but in the process of becoming our drug dealers of consumerism, it also poisoned itself.