China’s Population Under 1 Billion? Births Halved, Maternity Wards Empty, Kindergartens Close Daily!

The nicknames Xi Jinping can't erase, Winnie the Pooh, Xi Baozi, and the jokes that expose China's leader. From China's richest man to forced asset sales, how Wang Jianlin's Wanda crumbled after confirming Xi family ties. Former Shandong CPPCC member goes public, end the CCP's one-party dictatorship. Xi's India visit full of embarrassing incidents. Suspected physical discomfort at BRICS summit, Modi asks, are you okay? China's population, under one billion, births halved, empty maternity wards, and daily kindergarten closures. Welcome to Red Wall, where we examine major world events with clarity, context, and thoughtful analysis. The nicknames Xi Jinping can't erase, Winnie the Pooh, Xi Baozi, and the jokes that expose China's leader. When most people picture Winnie the Pooh, they see a round-bellied cartoon bear. Today, the character is also a global stand-in for Chinese Communist Party leader Xi Jinping. The meme began in June 2013, months after Xi took power. He met President Barack Obama at the Annenberg Estate in California. Both men wore casual shirts and walked across the lawn. A Reuters photo showed Xi looking rounder beside the taller, slimmer Obama. Chinese users quickly paired it with an image of Pooh standing next to Tigger. The match in posture, shadows, and feel was almost perfect. The earliest identifiable poster was a woman using the name Nicaragua Rabbit, listed in Hong Kong. It spread fast on Sina Weibo. Investor Kai-Fu Lee and real estate tycoon Ren Zhiqiang shared it, calling the resemblance full of positive energy. Censors soon deleted the post. Nicaragua Rabbit posted a screenshot of the notice and complained that even a harmless joke could not survive. The attempt to bury it produced the Streisand effect. On June 10, a user posted the image on Twitter. It went viral. The Atlantic, BuzzFeed, South China Morning Post, BBC, and others covered both the photo and the deletion. Nicaragua Rabbit joked she had become famous worldwide and that anyone wanting her autograph should hurry before she was invited for tea. The joke refused to die. At the 2014 APEC Summit, Xi's stiff handshake with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe became Pooh holding a miserable Eeyore. During the 2015 military parade, Xi standing in a review vehicle was recreated as Pooh, half out of a green toy car. The post was reposted tens of thousands of times. In the 96 minutes, it stayed online. The 2018 constitutional change removing presidential term limits pushed the symbol further. Users recirculated an old Disney China poster of Pooh hugging a giant honey jar. With the caption, find what you love, then never let go. Crowns and thrones followed. Weibo blocked the words Winnie the Pooh. Stickers vanished from WeChat. Western outlets reported the ban simply China banned Pooh because he looks like Xi. John Oliver mocked the comparison. HBO was blocked in China. Disney's Christopher Robin film was denied release. Taiwan's Red Candle Games hid the phrase Xi Jinping Winnie the Pooh in devotion. The game was pulled worldwide. South Park's episode, Banned in China, showed Pooh imprisoned, then killed to please Chinese censors. Creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone issued a sarcastic apology. Like the NBA, we welcome Chinese censors into our homes and into our hearts. We too love money more than freedom and democracy. Xi doesn't look like Winnie the Pooh at all. We good now, China? Hong Kong protesters screened the episode in the street. Later users kept the pressure on. Malaysian artists Namewee and Kimberly Chen put coded Pooh references in the song Fragile. Their Weibo accounts were blocked while the video passed 30 million YouTube views. NBA player Enes Kanter wore sneakers designed with dissident artist Badukaw that featured Pooh. A Taiwanese badge of a black bear punching Pooh went viral after Air Force pilots wore it during Chinese military drills. Even a child hitting a Pooh performer at Shanghai Disneyland forced Chinese media to call the character Pooh Pooh Bear, instantly spawning the new nickname Xi Pooh Pooh. If Pooh is Western culture colliding with Chinese politics, Xi Baozi and Qingfeng Emperor are homemade. On December 28, 2013, Xi made a staged visit to Beijing's Qingfeng Steamed Bun Shop. Under heavy security, he stood in line, ordered six pork and scallion buns, fried liver, and mustard greens for 21 yuan, then chatted with citizens who had been placed there. State media hailed it as proof he was down to earth. Internet users saw the theater and labeled him Xi Baozi, Xi Steamed Bun. After the 2018 term limit change, the nickname hardened into Qingfeng Emperor. In 2016, a returned student disappeared for days after wearing a Xi Baozi T-shirt. In 2017, a Hunan user was detained for insulting party and state leaders. The punishments only confirmed the nickname's power. Education became another weak point. In 2018, 102-year-old former official Li Rui said Xi had left middle school unfinished and that his real level remained elementary school. Official biographies list a Tsinghua doctorate in law. Xi entered university through the worker-peasant-soldier route as the son of elder Xi Zhengshun. The degree was earned while he held demanding posts in Fujian. And the dissertation on rural marketization somehow produced a law doctorate. By contrast, Li Keqiang entered Peking University through the restored college entrance exam and translated English legal texts. The gap showed. At the 2019 St. Petersburg Forum, a host asked about Trump's trade war. Xi fumbled for papers and muttered, Let me see if I have this in the notes I prepared. The phrase Xi's little notebook was born. From a simple visual gag to a global emblem of resistance, these nicknames track a long psychological contest. Every ban only added meaning. Dictators fear many things. But genuine laughter from the people has always been among the hardest to erase. From China's richest man to forced asset sales, how Wang Jianlin's Wanda crumbled after confirming Xi family ties. Is investing overseas the same as moving assets? I just said yes, it's moving assets. The money Wanda makes isn't stolen, robbed, or printed by us. As far as I know, robbing banks or printing fake money has nothing to do with Wanda. Everything we have is earned through hard work. And since we worked hard for this money, I can invest it wherever I want. Those words came from Wang Jianlin, founder of Wanda Group, once China's largest commercial real estate empire, and briefly, the country's richest man, surpassing even Hong Kong's Li Ka-shing. He spoke them at Harvard in 2015. The bold claim confirmed that Wanda was shifting assets abroad. It also drew official attention. When answering a New York Times report on powerful Chinese elites holding Wanda shares, Wang said Qi Chiaoqiao and Deng Xiaogui, sister and brother-in-law of Xi Jinping, had transferred all their shares two months before the company went public. He added that Deng had sacrificed significant personal benefits. The remarks were meant to distance Wanda from the Xi family. Instead, they confirmed the foreign reports and revealed that the shares had gone to a longtime employee of the couple's firm, a classic white-glove arrangement used by CCP elites to hide business interests. A financial site soon quoted Wang praising Xi's strict governance, even over his own family. The article vanished within hours. The next year, Wanda hit its peak. Then the decline began. From 2006 to 2016, the company spread across China, shaping the look of countless city centers. It bought AMC Theatres for $2.6 billion, Legendary Entertainment for $3.5 billion, and other cinema chains, becoming the world's largest cinema operator. It moved into sports and overseas assets. In one day, Wang flew 6,000 kilometers, visited three cities, and signed 50 billion yuan in deals. That rise rested on political capital. In 2007, Minghao Holdings, linked to the son of Wang Jiaguo, then a National People's Congress vice chairman, bought 2.5% of Wanda for under $500,000. By 2015, the stake was worth $640 million. Another investor traced to the son-in-law of Jia Qinglin, then CPPCC chairman. Wang became a CPPCC standing member. In 2009, Beijing Qinchuan Daidi Investment, controlled by Qi Chaochao and Deng Jiagui, put in $28.6 million while she was still vice president. Wen Jiabao's daughter, Wen Ruchun, through an associate and his son, Wen Yunsong's New Horizon Capital, also held stakes worth hundreds of millions by 2015. These were the publicly known cases. With such backers, Wang topped China's rich list that year with 86 billion yuan. After the 2015 disclosures, the political winds shifted. She emphasized financial security. People's Bank Governor Zhou Xiaochuan warned against risky overseas investment, widely seen as aimed at Wanda. By end 2016, Wanda Commercial Properties held 100 billion yuan in cash, but 520 billion in liabilities, a 74% debt-to-asset ratio. Profits could not cover interest. In 2017, banks demanded repayment. Wang lost the richest man title to Evergrande's Xu Jiayin. Wanda sold 13 cultural tourism cities and 76 hotels for 63 billion yuan, then dumped overseas assets. It repaid more than 200 billion yuan in debt, and later another 600 billion overall. Yet, the pressure continued. In early 2025, Wanda sold five plazas in Zhuancheng, Tongling, Saiping, and elsewhere to Kunhua Equity Investment, backed by state-owned New China Life Insurance and China International Capital Corporation. Kunhua already held nine others from 202414 plazas total. Saiping and Yangzhou projects, opened in 2016 and 2017 in core districts, were still in their most profitable years. Shares held by Wang and his son, Wang Sikong, have been frozen repeatedly. By January, frozen assets linked to disputes reached about 6 billion yuan. Wang pledged all 2.4 million of his Dalian Wanda shares. His fortune has fallen from over 200 billion yuan to just over 30 billion. Photos show him thin and frail. Online comments ask how he got so thin and whether his son is the worry. Insurance companies and red aristocracy-linked buyers have taken dozens of plazas since 2023. Some describe the process as the party looting Wanda, turning private assets into party-owned ones. Under Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao, private entrepreneurs had limited breathing room. Under Xi, that space has narrowed sharply. Observers say Wanda may already be a hollowed-out shell, and Wang's fate could mirror Su Jiayin's detention. The empire that once defined China's commercial skyline is being absorbed by the same political system that helped build it. Former Shandong CPPCC member goes public, end the CCP's one-party dictatorship. Zhou Chunwei, a former member of the Shandong Provincial Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, who now lives overseas, has published an open letter calling for an end to the Chinese Communist Party's one-party rule. On September 8, Guang Media carried her signed piece, My Position, End One-Party Dictatorship. Editor-in-chief Wang Ana, herself a former Qinghai Provincial CPPCC member, wrote that it is rare for someone from inside the system to step forward this way and break with it. Wang described today's China under Xi Jinping as comprehensively regressed. Industries in decline, society dark, people barely making a living, rule held only by suppression and surveillance. Silence, she wrote, only speeds the slide into disaster. More people, inside and outside the system, need to see the failure and the suffering and speak. Zhou opened plainly. She is from Shandong, was elected to the 13th Shandong Provincial CPPCC in January 2023, and had her qualification revoked on 17 January 2025. She founded the Shandong Jiangtu Charity Public Welfare Foundation. The letter, she said, is to state something she once did not dare imagine, public withdrawal of all identification with the CCP and public opposition to its long monopoly on state power. The change did not happen abroad and was not the result of persuasion. It came from what she saw inside China as a CPPCC member and charity head positions ordinary people cannot enter, and from the price she paid for speaking about it. Born into a poor rural family, she had wanted to help children in the same situation. In 2016, she founded a student aid center in Zibo and later the Provincial Foundation. The work grew. In 2023, she entered the Provincial CPPCC. Once there, she dealt regularly with provincial, municipal and county officials and found words and deeds did not match. On the stage, what I heard was the people, dedication, integrity and hard struggle. Off the stage, I saw another kind of life. The gap between public rhetoric and private living exceeded anything she had imagined. At the same time, she was still chasing a few thousand yuan in tuition for a child while watching families bow and scrape. A single official meal or bottle of wine could exceed a year or more of that family's expenses. She asked the obvious questions. If the party represents the broadest masses, why do those with power live so differently? If officials serve the people, why must poor children's tuition depend on private fundraising? If the system is clean, why must enterprises and charities first cultivate relations with officials simply to obtain space that should already belong to them? Speeches and proposals by CPPCC members had to conform fully to the party's political agenda. Because she insisted on speaking truthfully, she met repeated, curved pressure. Authorities used annual inspections and approval power over her charity to treat the children she helped as leverage. Force a party branch into the organization, divert donated money tens of millions of yuan in the end to support government institutions. In 2025, her CPPCC membership was stripped without a single conversation or explanation. She concluded the problem was not a few bad officials, but the system itself. She demanded an end to one-party dictatorship and the monopoly on state power. An end to the party substituting for government and for law, so that the constitution and statutes stand above the party. And that the party relinquish control over the judiciary, public security, media, enterprises, and social organizations. She hoped for a day when Chinese people no longer fear criticizing power, no longer lose positions or the work of their hands for one different word. When opinion does not first need review, government is constrained by law, courts are independent, media can investigate power, civic groups can operate without mandatory party entry, and citizens can freely express political views and choose their own government. She's India visit full of embarrassing incidents. Suspected physical discomfort at BRICS summit. Modi asks, Are you okay? Xi Jinping went to India for the BRICS summit and ran into a string of awkward moments. Videos show Chinese and Indian staff arguing at the car. His interpreter stopped again. A solitary walk down the red carpet with a flushed, displeased face. And host Narendra Modi pausing to ask whether he was all right. The 18th BRICS summit ran September 12-13 in India, focused on trade, investment, and global conflicts. China's foreign ministry said Xi would hold a bilateral with Modi, but gave no list of accompanying officials or delegation size. At noon on the 12th, Xi's plane landed at New Delhi's Palem Air Force Station. Only one Indian minister-level official met him. Modi did not appear. In August 2023 in South Africa, President Cyril Ramaphosa had greeted him at the airport in person. Xi came down the stairs alone, right hand on the rail the whole way. Most of the cameras in his face looked Chinese. Security with black briefcases scanned the ground. Before the trip, China had already sent two Hongqi and 701 official cars to New Delhi, bodies wrapped in black covers. Locals filmed them. Online comments called the look inauspicious, like funeral vehicles. At the venue, the car sat while no one opened the door. Chinese and Indian staff outside gestured and argued. When the door finally opened, an Indian official offered a brief greeting and waved him toward the entrance. The male interpreter tried to stay close. Indian security forced him into a different passageway. He hurried around, looking pressed. Walking the red carpet alone, Xi's face was red, expression dark, blinking often. After a photo with Modi, he stood blank. When Modi pointed out a mural, Xi does not speak English until an Indian interpreter stepped in. On X, the comments were sharp. Walking the red carpet is like going to the execution ground. There are no small matters in diplomacy. The so-called chaos is cold treatment with a political point. The same interpreter problem had hit in South Africa in 2023, when Suning was stopped at the door and Xi entered alone. Turning to look back, as the door closed. During Modi's opening speech that afternoon, India's Doordarshan cameras caught the host glancing left, stopping and asking, Is it okay? A staff member moved forward with something. Netizens guessed illness or a headset fault. Xi skipped the evening Heads of State dinner, not the first BRICS dinner. He has missed feeding speculation about health or the difficulty of informal English-heavy settings. That evening, as his motorcade moved through New Delhi, Tibetans holding snow lion flags chased the car and shouted, Free Tibet! Down with Xi Jinping! China, get out of Tibet! And Tibet will prevail. Some were stopped by Indian police. Online reactions were blunt. Outside China, he is treated like a rat in the street. Only a few regimes draw that level of hate from their own people when their leaders travel. High-pressure stability maintenance at home does not travel. The protests on the street were the part that looked genuine. China's population Under 1 billion. Births halved. Empty maternity wards. And daily kindergarten closures. China recorded just 7.92 million births in 2025, down 1.62 million, or about 17% from the year before, according to the National Bureau of Statistics. Deaths hit 11.3 million. In 2016, the country still registered 17.86 million newborns. In less than a decade, the number has fallen by more than half. Ordinary people see it in the hospitals. A woman in a Jiangsu county filmed the maternity ward that serves 400,000 residents. It was completely empty. Another who stayed several days in her county hospital's OBGYN department said she barely heard a baby cry. Where have all the people giving birth gone? I used to hear that the birth rate was very low, but that was just something I heard about. This time, I truly felt it myself. A third woman compared her 2012 delivery when extra beds filled the hallways and mothers were sent home the next day to free space, with today's deserted corridors. Just look at how things have changed in a little over 10 years, from fighting for hospital beds to empty rooms. Starting the 4th of January 2026, the traditional Chinese Medicine and Western Medicine Hospital in Tangyin County, Henan, stopped inpatient childbirth services, citing population changes and resource optimization. In a Zhejiang county of about 1 million people, Yikai found only around 200 inpatient births a year, sometimes fewer than 10 a month. Authorities centralized services at the county people's hospital. Henan earlier stripped midwifery qualifications from more than 50 institutions that delivered under 100 babies annually. Kindergartens are vanishing just as fast. Ministry of Education data show 231,900 kindergartens in 2025, down more than 21,000 from 253,300 the previous year, nearly 59 closing every day. Enrollment dropped from 35.8 million to 32.2 million, a loss of 3.5 million children. A director who ran a preschool for 15 years filmed its final days. This is the kindergarten I've run for 15 years, and it's about to close. I'm really reluctant to let it go, but there's nothing I can do. Now it's quiet and empty. A parent nearby watched the fourth local kindergarten prepare to shut after its graduating class of 2030 children and zero new enrollments. My daughter might soon have nowhere to go to school. In Gansu, one small county closed eight kindergartens. In Shandong, Jinan closed 11 primary schools. Workers posted appeals. Please, everyone have more children. We're almost losing our jobs. Primary schools follow the same path. In 2025, the number of regular primary schools fell from 136,300 to 128,300. Teaching sites dropped nearly 10,000. A Guangzhou parent saw her son's relatively good school go from 10 first grade classes of 40 students, each about 400 children, to fewer than 200 students and under five classes before he even graduated. In Chaoshan, once known for larger families, marriage and birth rates still decline under pressure. A Jiangsu parent watched the school downstairs cut from eight first grade classes to four. Moyu County in Xinjiang projects primary enrollment falling from 125,900 in 2022 to 32,000 and 700 by 2029 and plans to merge or close 17 village schools this year. Why have young people stopped having children? Money and confidence. A Northeastern resident put it plainly. We can't afford to raise them. Even if both parents work, they can't afford tutoring for one middle school child. The cheapest class is 400 yuan per session. Having children has become such a high risk investment. Delivery jobs require paying station managers first setting off the cannon before orders. Arrive. A Qingdao graduate earned only 1,000 yuan a month on probation and said most classmates have no marriage plans. I don't want to date. I don't want to get married. I don't want to have children. I don't have much hope for the future. Algorithms feed men endless messages about bride prices and financial burdens while showing women the costs of childbirth, housework and in-law conflicts. The result is mutual distrust. One Heilongjiang man compared generations. His grandparents' cohort produced seven children. His own produced three or zero. Having both a son and a daughter has now become having both cats and dogs. During the family planning era, the CCP limited births. Today, it bans lying flat talk, removes related content and has Xi Jinping urge youth to listen to the party and follow the party. Xinhua declares lying flat unacceptable. Yet the internet can delete slogans. It cannot delete unemployment, weak wages or the crushing costs of housing, education and elder care. Authorities can promote marriage and childbirth. They cannot restore the belief that tomorrow will be better. We value your perspective. Let us know your thoughts in the comments. If you found this report meaningful, please share it with others. 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