Back in the early ’80s, it was the conventional wisdom of the brow-furrowing set that the Soviet Union was on the verge of putting those upstart Yanks in their place. The communist giant was on the verge of becoming not just a military superpower, but an economic one as well. The Soviet economy, the likes of the Economist adamantly insisted, was on an unstoppable track to overtake the United States. We all know how that ended: like eco-superstar Paul Ehrlich, the pundits were wrong in direct proportion to their certainty.
Today, the Soviet epicentre, Russia, barely scrapes into the Top 10 economies. Of its satellite of former Soviet Socialist Republics, Kazakhstan sits highest at an embarrassing Number 45.
But hopes of communist economic dominance spring eternal in the Marx-besotted minds of the commentariat. Following the collapse of the USSR, they’ve pinned their fading red ribbons on China. That might seem to be a reasonable bet: China is the second-ranked global economy. Yet, even that is a distant second: today, China’s economy is one-third that of the USA. More importantly, while the US GDP growth rate has been up and down like a bride’s nightie from year to year, overall it has climbed steadily for the last 60 years. China’s annual growth rate has practically flatlined, if not slowly declined, since 1963.
And it’s about to hit the same cliff the Soviets did in 1989.
As Mark Steyn pointed out years ago, China is growing older and more male much faster than it’s grown its GDP. As Steyn joked, unless China plans to become the first gay superpower since Sparta, its days are numbered.
That cliff is approaching faster than anyone could have expected. As decades of typically communist attempts to centrally plan the nation catch up on them, its demography is falling faster than Wile E Coyote with an anvil around his neck.
China is now supporting more people aged 65 and above than children, underscoring the impact of its rapidly ageing population and a declining birth rate.
Data from China’s National Bureau of Statistics showed the old-age dependency ratio – the non-working-age population compared to the working-age population – was 23.1 per cent in 2025, compared with 22 per cent for children, Chinese state-affiliated media Yicai reported.
The grim bean-counters at Beijing’s National Bureau of Statistics have finally laid bare the bill for four decades of social engineering: at least, so far as the Central Committee will allow the rest of the world to see. For the first time in modern history, the greybeards outnumber the babes in the Middle Kingdom. The dependency ratio of retirees leaning on the dwindling ranks of working-age drones reached 23.1 per cent last year, comfortably leapfrogging the 22 per cent share held by children.
It is the inescapable harvest of Chairman Deng’s infamous One-Child Policy, which for 35 years mandated forced abortions, sterilisations and family destruction to solve a phantom problem of ‘overpopulation’. Now, having spent decades bulldozing the traditional family into the dustbin of Marxist theory, the Communist Party suddenly discovers that you cannot simply flip a switch and order an exhausted, urbanised populace to start breeding on command. China’s young are even less inclined to continue the species than its giant pandas.
Party apparatchiks have naturally tried the usual bureaucratic sweet-talk, offering tax lollies, childcare handouts and discounted hospital beds to coax young couples into popping out a sprog or two. The response from the Chinese public has been a resounding collective yawn. The fertility rate has plunged to an astonishing one birth per woman, and the overall population has contracted for four consecutive years. The factory floors of Guangdong and the rusted rust-belt provinces of the northeast are rapidly turning into cavernous geriatric wards.
Western nations, when confronted with their own homegrown demographic winter, have taken the suicidal route of mass migration, papering over the collapse of native birthrates by throwing open the gates to the Third World. But that escape hatch is utterly closed to Beijing.
Unlike the self-flagellating West, China cannot even dream of importing young blood from Africa or the Middle East to bolster its sagging ranks. Chinese society is not merely casually intolerant – it is resolutely, unapologetically racist to its core. In vast swathes of the provinces beyond the glitzy neon of Shanghai and Shenzhen – which is to say, almost the entirety of the mainland – simply possessing a non-Han countenance is viewed with profound suspicion bordering on witchcraft.
The notion of hundreds of millions of elderly Chinese peasants warmly welcoming millions of African orderlies to wipe their arses and empty their bedpans in their twilight years is an even more ludicrous fantasy than the Soviet Union’s long-predicted triumph over capitalism.
Now we know why China’s investing so heavily in robotics. Compared to importing the Third World by the dinghy-load, it’s a pretty smart strategy: but is it enough? The red dragon is running out of puff, running out of workers and running out of time.
The communist planners thought they could defy basic human nature and arithmetic with bureaucratic diktats, but the arithmetic is finally having its revenge.
