Is a five-child policy on the horizon for China? In the communist country’s top-down form of government, when a mandate ends in failure — in this case, one meant to control population size — new dictates must replace it.  

For the first time since 1960, China has posted negative population growth, according to statistics Beijing released Tuesday. Thus, it is on the road to losing its status as the globe’s most populated country, with India gaining fast. China’s aging, male-heavy population bodes ill for a regime that strives to overtake America as the world’s top economy.  

Beijing’s one-child policy lasted between 1980 and 2015. Fearing a population explosion, the authoritarian regime tightly enforced the draconian family-planning restriction. Beyond forced abortions, the idea that men are bound to do better in life than women led many families to drown newborn girls in the nearest river. 

According to Beijing’s national bureau of statistics — a highly suspect source — mainland China had 850,000 fewer people in 2022 than in 2021, and more than a million fewer babies were born last year. China’s population has 722 million males and 690 million females. With fewer two-parent families, births are likely to shrink even further, and thus by some measures the future looks bleak.

The number of people ages 60 and older is projected to reach 40 percent of the Chinese population by 2050. In 2020, the average age was 37. In India, the world’s largest democracy, the average age is 29, and more than 65 percent of the population is under the age of 30. 

Aging societies face economic woes. Safety networks — private or state-run — collapse when a growing number of retirees depend on the financial support of fewer people at their prime work age. Japan, home of the world’s largest over-65 population, has been struggling with that problem for quite some time.

In 2019, the International Monetary Fund reported that Japan’s “rapidly aging population and shrinking labor force are hampering growth.” The impact of aging, it concluded, could drag down Japan’s average annual GDP growth by 1 percentage point over the next three decades. 

Japan’s graying is the result of changing lifestyles and personal decisions regarding offspring. The country has struggled with solutions for nearly a decade now, including pushing to increase the participation of women in the workforce. 

Communist China is yet to even face up to the problems presented by an aging society. “China has become older before it has become rich,” a demographer of Chinese population trends at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Yi Fuxian, told the Associated Press. 

Contrary to Beijing’s official statistics, China’s population has been declining since 2018, showing the population crisis is “much more severe” than previously thought, Mr. Yi said. Its “real demographic crisis is beyond imagination,” and all of its “past economic, social, defense and foreign policies were based on faulty demographic data.” 

The communist behemoth’s shrinking, aging, and gender-skewed population puts another dent in predictions that have long seen the Chinese economy overtaking that of America’s in the near future.

While Communist China until very recently has been seen as the world’s factory, producing everything from T-shirts to aspirin, several factors, including a shrinking workforce, show that in fairly short order China could lose its manufacturing prowess. India, an ally of the American-led Indo-Pacific bloc of democracies, could be a candidate to replace it in this area.

“America’s problem in Asia is not that China is too rich, it is that India is too poor,” a Wall Street Journal columnist, Walter Russell Mead, writes in a dispatch from New Delhi. He recommends adjusting America’s trade policy to favor Indian imports. 

With India on the way to becoming the most populous country, and as world importers seek to diversify supply chains and move away from Communist China, New Delhi has an opportunity to strengthen its economy by adding manufacturing to its hi-tech prowess. China’s aging population gives India an additional edge in that competition. 

What is Beijing to do? In 2016, after decades of allowing couples to have only one child, it realized that the policy was faulty and changed it, allowing two children per family. Last year, as that tweak failed to produce the desired population growth, Chairman Xi allowed families to bear as many as three children.

The logic of the government mandating personal decisions like family planning must lead to an inevitable conclusion: To continue thriving, Beijing must now mandate larger families, and a five-child policy may just be the start.