[CLIP] How the CCP ‘Killed Off Its Future’: Steven Mosher

when I was in China uh the one child policy began and I think that hands down is the the largest destruction of human capital that the world has ever seen uh up until a few years ago uh Communist Party leaders in China were actually bragging about having eliminated 400 million people from the Chinese population uh through forced abortion in fact back in 2012 uh in Washington DC uh I was in a meeting with the former minister of health of the People's Republic of China as claiming exactly that number of births had been what he said averted by the one child policy now it turns out that you can't kill off 400 million of the most productive enterprising hardworking people on the planet without doing severe damage to your economy over time and that in fact has has is what has happened uh not only of course is it a huge human tragedy uh the loss of all those children the forced abortions and sterilization of of all of those women who suffered greatly mentally and physically as a result but think about what that means now in terms of these well 70 million empty apartment buildings uh the young men and women who would have married and started families and purchased those apartment buildings perhaps uh were killed decades ago and uh they you cannot you cannot bring them back to life now so in killing off half of the last two generations uh China has uh the Chinese Communist party has killed off uh its future literally uh the only future that you know a family has is its children the only future that a nation has are its families and its children and uh the Chinese Communist party uh what I call the biggest killing machine in human history by far has uh killed off uh China's economic future by means of the 35 years of the one child policy now they didn't wake up to that fact until 2016 the policy went into place effectively in guangong province in 1980 when I was first there it ended in 2016 why because the Chinese Communist Party woke up to the fact that it had at that time a labor shortage of 4 .1 million workers in the country now how do you create a labor shortage in the most populous country on Earth well killing off 400 million people will uh pretty much put you in that position uh and since then the Chinese Communist party has been making increasingly desperate efforts to get the birth rate up they announced a two child policy in 2016 expecting a baby boom they got a little tiny boomlet and then the birth rate continued to fall so it was a year and a half ago they announced now that they were moving to a three-child policy basically saying to the Chinese people the surviving young men and young women who had survived the one child policy basically saying you can now be fruitful and multiply and the young people in China said no we're not interested you've told us for almost four decades that that children are expensive uh and uh and that we should stop at once at at at having children we should stop at one child and now you're telling us that we should have two or three uh were not interested marriage rates continue to decline in China and the birth rate continues to decline uh the birth rate now is probably the lowest that we have seen in China uh over the last century there were fewer than 10 million babies born in China last year and even though there are very very few forced abortions now in China except for among uh minorities and persecuted groups uh there are now many more abortions in China than there are live births which again does not bode well for the future of the country you know it's it's it's astonishing to me that dong Shao ping fell for the Western idea of overpopulation uh back in 1980 and announced a one child policy thinking that that was going to be the high road to Economic Development to China joining the first rank of Nations to the Communist Party being empowered by economic growth to build a military uh capable of dominating the world they thought that in the 1980s now I think they're beginning to realize that that they have in effect strangled the China dream of world domination in the Cradle because with China's economy on the downturn with China's population aging and dying more rapidly than any human population has in the history of the planet uh the 21st century will not belong to China uh in part because of the continued misrule of the Chinese Communist party but in large part because of the killing off of half of the last two generations projections now that that that I've made looking into the future that show that by 2070 or maybe as early as 26 the population of the United States will probably be larger than that of the population of China now communist parties always kill sometimes they kill slowly sometimes they kill quickly by execution uh the one child policy has been a kind of uh a slow death warrant for the Chinese people and by the end of this coming Century if the birth rate stays at around 1 per woman over her reproductive lifetime we're looking at only having about about 400 million Chinese alive down from 1.4 billion today and that's uh the achievement of the Chinese Communist Party The Killing off of the majority of the Chinese people over time China's population is actually falling is decreasing from year to year China's pop filling uh filling fewer cradles than coffins today and that's a sad sad fact so so what that means is that demog Ric dividend that you got from having very few children and young people staying in the workforce especially young women contributed to China's rapid economic growth it contributed to the military buildup it contributed to its strategic expansion that that demographic dividend is gone instead as the number of working age people declines we'll see labor costs go up and uh China hasn't transitioned yet to a rich country it is still a Middle inome Country now you can say well Japan got old and sou South Korea got old Taiwan got old a lot of countries on the world have gotten old over time we see that in Europe as well but all of those countries got rich before they grew old they grew Rich before they grew old which meant they had the resources to continue to prosper even as the population was aging and the workforce was starting to level out and Shrink China doesn't have that luxury China is still a Middle inome Country it is still relatively poor hundreds of millions of people are still relatively poor in China CH China is growing old before it grew rich and uh there's no way out of that demographic trap that the Chinese Communist party has set for the Chinese people and this is a b baby bust I think that explains why China's economy will have a hard time recovering from its current problems regardless of what mix of economic incentives uh the government puts in place regardless of how much they lower the interest rates or S try to subsidize exports or engage in any of the other things that they would like to do they can't make up for you know 400 million missing people they can't make up for 100 million empty cradles that resource the ultimate resource the human being cannot be replaced it is irreplaceable don't forget to subscribe to our alerts newsletter and you'll never miss an episode