The report from the press association that Communist China’s population shrank last year for the first time in decades certainly rang the gong in the editorial galley in which we pull an oar. The AP calls it a “dramatic turn” in a country that once sought to control population growth. It says the news adds to “pressure on leaders to keep the economy growing despite an aging workforce and at a time of rising tension with the U.S.”

We were glad to see the AP mark this point. That a drop in population is bad news for a country — or the planet — is a truth that needs to be put down where us mules can get to it. Particularly because, as the AP reports, “many wealthy countries are struggling with how to respond to aging workforces, which can be a drag on economic growth” — particularly in a developing economy like Communist China’s.

The population dip seems to have unnerved Beijing, which has been taking steps to reverse what now looks like a serious demographic decline. The problem goes back to the “one-child” policy, imposed in 1980 to limit population growth. The hope was to “bolster the economic boom that was then just beginning,” the New York Times reports, and the regime “often employed brutal tactics as they forced women to get abortions or be sterilized.”

By 2013, Beijing began to realize its mistake, and started allowing parents from one-child families to have two children. By 2016, the two-child limit was extended to all. By 2021 Beijing was pleading with couples to have three tots. A scholar of China’s population, Yi Fuxian, explains that “China has become older before it has become rich,” and the fall in the national headcount was starting about a decade earlier than anticipated.

China’s “real demographic crisis is beyond imagination,” Mr. Yi concludes. The population drop, the AP reports, is raising echoes of Mao’s Great Leap Forward of the 1950s, when the Marxist drive to convert the Chinese economy to industrialization and collective farming led to disaster. In the famine that ensued, tens of millions of Chinese died. Today’s figures mean China is likely to be overtaken by India as the world’s most populous nation.

China’s population crisis serves, too, as a rebuke to the emerging sentiment on the left that finds — in part for ecological reasons — advantage in having fewer humans treading the earth. As far back as 2001 there were inklings of this view in a Nature magazine study that foretold the 21st century would witness the human population stop growing, or even decline. The authors saw it as “welcome news for efforts towards sustainable development.”

At the same time, though, the debate took a turn with the ghastly realization that population control had led to sex selection on a vast scale — resulting in a crisis that these columns dealt with in “The Missing Girls.” This, in our view, was an outgrowth of the Robert McNamara era at the World Bank, when it argued that the liberation of women had to come at the expense of population growth. Millions of women were selected out of existence. 

That hasn’t changed what might be called the anti-humanist left. Just recently, the Times profiled the head of the “Voluntary Human Extinction movement,” Les Knight — motto: “Thank you for not breeding” — calling him “remarkably happy-go-lucky.” His view is that “We’re not a good species” and so “the best thing humans can do to help the earth is to stop having children.”

It’s a comfort that, as the Times reports, Mr. Knight and his allies “do not support mass murder or birth control.” His ethos chills nevertheless. It calls to mind the words of one who contended with another Communist regime that, like China, put ideology above the dignity of human life. Quoth Solzhenitsyn: “Every move, every law should be assessed in terms of whether it helps to preserve the people. If not, down with the law.”