CHRIS REED
Two candidates leap to mind. The climate emergency causing hell in Europe this week — and promising hell for all eventually — is one. The growing popularity of authoritarian views in the United States and many other nations is the second.
The failure of a third to capture the media’s attention is baffling: the increasingly frank way that the Pentagon acknowledges that its military appears to regularly encounter unidentified aerial phenomena, citing spacecraft that can do things no human-made craft could ever do — with the evidence being not just pilots’ visual anecdotes but their jets’ tracking technology. This isn’t 1990s alien abduction and crop circles crapola. This is the richest, most powerful institution in the world telling us there may be aliens among us. Shouldn’t this get more attention than Bennifer?
There is an equally profound story that’s, ahem, flying under the radar. And that is the fact that women around the world are increasingly disinclined to have children.
This, of course, affects everything — but its impact on geopolitics is profound. This phenomenon has gutted assumptions that China, long the world’s most populous nation, would use its immense, ever-growing workforce to surpass the United States as the planet’s dominant economy and eventually as Earth’s most powerful nation.
This development has been most documented by Fuxian Yi, an obstetrician and researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who carefully tracks official and unofficial data coming out of China. This month, Yi plumbed what appears to be the biggest known hack in human history — the theft of personal records of about 1 billion Chinese citizens from police in Shanghai — and found it confirmed his view of a nation atrophying years earlier than expected.
“Births began to decline in 1991,” he wrote. “Population is now less than 1.28 billion, not the official 1.41 billion; population began to shrink in 2018, not 2031 as officially predicted.” This nearly 10 percent decline in just four years means India is now the most populated nation — and that India, not China, may be the biggest threat to U.S. pre-eminence, especially as its education system keeps improving and its population keeps growing, albeit slowly.
Why would China dissemble about its population — and thus encourage any conspiratorialists who question the official theory about the supposed emergence of the coronavirus pandemic in late 2019 at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan, 570 miles north of Hong Kong? To suppress bad news about the Xi Jinping regime.
A January analysis by The New York Times noted that the nation’s immense economic gains since abandoning communism 40 years ago could disappear amid worker shortages; that the pension costs of an aging nation may force the government to cut back all other spending; and, most importantly, that a decline in population would show the abject folly of Beijing’s heavy-handed official “one child” policy from 1980 to 2015, a brutal intervention against reproduction that continued for decades after demographics indicated it was no longer needed to slow population growth.
Imagine living in a nation whose leaders made a plausible case that it was on track for world dominance — only for it to falter because of giant government mistakes. No wonder China is a punitive high-tech surveillance state wary of dissent. It knows disillusioned young adults call themselves “the last generation.”
But in the larger picture, China is not at all alone. Only a relatively few affluent nations average the 2.1 births per woman that would keep population stable, absent other factors, and only the poorest continent — Africa — is on track for the sort of sharp population increases that once led some scholars to argue that overpopulation eventually would be the world’s worst problem. It used to be that increased wealth, improved education and ready access to contraception drove down the birth rate. Of course, there are many other reasons as well, only starting with medical and environmental concerns. But it may be no coincidence that the world’s most wired — and maybe distracted — nation, South Korea, also has the lowest birth rate (0.84 per woman).
This depopulation could help save an environmentally stressed planet. On the other hand, there won’t be nearly enough money to go around when there are as many retirees getting government benefits as workers paying taxes, not just in China but worldwide. Mass poverty may loom.
But maybe the aliens will get over their shyness in coming years and share the amazing tech that the Pentagon can’t figure out, ushering in a new world of unlimited clean energy, virtual beach villas for all and the renaissance of the $7 shrimp burrito. I want to believe. Om. Om. Om.
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