News that China’s population is declining — for the third year in a row, with no sign of a turnaround — is best seen as a leading indicator of the failure of the communist regime. “China is staring down a longer term baby bust that is rippling through the economy,” is how the Times puts it. The shrinking population, which telegraphs future weakness, is all the more jarring for coming at a time when Beijing is ramping up its global ambitions. 

China’s birthrate “is falling off a cliff,” the Times reports, quoting a former kindergarten at Chongqing. Kindergarten enrollments  “plummeted by more than five million in 2023,” the Times says, pointing to the latest available statistics, reflecting the fact that “China’s childbearing population is declining and young people are reluctant to have children.” This isn’t just an economic and political disaster, though, but a long-term human tragedy.

After all, population, even more than statistics like gross domestic product or per capita income, is the key measure of a nation’s strength. It’s also a yardstick for the legitimacy of governments. As the Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn put it: “Every move, every law should be assessed in terms of whether it helps to preserve the people. If not, down with the law.” What does it say about the communist regime that the Chinese people are in decline?

As China endures its 75th year under communism, the falling population can be laid at the feet of the mandarins at Beijing. It reflects a defect of totalitarian government — relying on the state and its “experts” as opposed to trusting the people. Chairman Mao set up this system, defying the wisdom of the founder of Chinese democracy, Sun Yat-sen, a New York Sun contributor who advocated self-rule because “I believe in the Chinese people.”

Mao and his successors, to be sure, never trusted the Chinese people enough to allow them a say in their government. Worse, the regime’s mistakes, like the disastrous Great Leap Forward, took the lives of tens of millions. Today’s population crash, which will prove exponentially more costly in human lives, is the bitter fruit of another decision by the dictatorship at Beijing: the one-child policy launched in 1980. 

It was “one of the biggest social experiments in history,” the Wall Street Journal reported. The policy emerged at a time when global population was surging and the scientific consensus — like, say, today’s certainty over global warming — centered on “fears that humanity would reproduce faster than food production could rise,” echoing Malthus. The communists at Beijing decided to swing into action to avert this perceived disaster.

Scientists urged the regime to bring “the fertility rate down to 1 … each couple having only one child,” as they put it in an essay in the People’s Daily. A top backer of the scheme was a Soviet-trained expert in “satellites and rockets,” Song Jian, the Journal wrote. He applied his knowledge of rocketry to the seeds of life and, historian Susan Greenhalgh says, “used a frightening narrative of a coming demographic-economic-ecological crisis to persuade people.”

Sound familiar? Mr. Song’s views are echoed by eco-militants. Take, say, the Nature magazine study that saw a 21st-century population dip as “welcome news for efforts towards sustainable development.” Yet China’s one-child policy featured “brutal enforcement, including forced abortions and sterilizations,” and a lost generation of women because the scientists’ modeling “failed to take into account the traditional preference for sons,” the Journal reported.

The current decline suggests a kind of poetic justice, and a cautionary tale for the West, that the communists sowed the seeds of their own decline by failing to appreciate the human capital with which China is so richly endowed. It speaks to the point that respect for human dignity, and indeed life itself, is not only a practical question but a moral one. The Chinese Communists tremble before the religions that teach these truths.