Are Chinese communists lying about number of babies born? They’ve got every reason to

Jan 23, 2020 by Jill

by Steven Mosher, LifeSite:

The most populous country on earth has been committing demographic suicide for years with its ‘one-child’ policy.

China’s National Bureau of Statistics just announced that 14.65 million babies were born in China last year. It also claimed that China’s population continued to grow, reaching 1.4 billion by the end of 2019, up from 1.39 billion the year before.

Both claims are probably false. The real number of births is lower, probably much lower. As for the population of the most populous country on earth, it has not only stopped growing, but may actually be shrinking.

So why is the Communist Party insisting on inflating the numbers?

Because to do otherwise would be to admit that one of its signature economic policies of the past forty years—the one-child policy–may have fatally compromised China’s future. For decades the Party justified its brutal birth limitation policies, which involved arresting, imprisoning, and forcibly aborting tens of millions of women, as a necessary precondition of economic growth. “The strict regulation of births is the only way out of poverty,” or so the Party line went.

But while the Party was celebrating the elimination of 400 million human beings, a demographic winter slowly descended upon the country it was misgoverning. China’s population is now aging more rapidly than any population in human history, its birth rate is in free fall, and its future economic growth imperiled.

The artificial inflation of birth and population numbers is nothing more than an effort by Party hacks to hide these failures and escape responsibility.

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