For the first time in decades the Chinese population is shrinking.

The last time that happened it was due to Mao’s Great Leap Forward famines. This time it’s due to China’s all-too-successful decades-long population control policies initiated in 1970 and finally ended in 2021. The most famous of these policies was the “one child policy,” which was in effect between 1980 and 2015.

Back in the late 60s environmentalists, especially the always-wrong Paul Ehrlich, started beating the Zero Population Growth (ZPG) drum, and countries such as China and India picked up the mantra with zeal. Those countries and others instituted policies of forced sterilization and other appalling anti-natal policies.

China has reversed course, and for a pretty obvious reason: the aging of the population.

The world’s most populous country has reached a pivotal moment: China’s population has begun to shrink, after a steady, yearslong decline in its birthrate that experts say will be irreversible.

The government said on Tuesday that 9.56 million people were born in China in 2022, while 10.41 million people died. It was the first time deaths had outnumbered births in China since the early 1960s, when the Great Leap Forward, Mao Zedong’s failed economic experiment, led to widespread famine and death.

“In the long run, we are going to see a China the world has never seen,” said Wang Feng, a professor of sociology at the University of California at Irvine who specializes in demographics in China.

“It will no longer be the young, vibrant, growing population. We will start to appreciate China, in terms of its population, as an old and shrinking population.”

Be careful what you wish for. You just might get it.

The ZPG movement was always misguided, based upon a notion of the economy as a zero-sum game. If the economy is zero-sum, each additional mouth to feed takes food from somebody else.

If this were the case, of course a burgeoning population would be a huge problem. But as with all Malthusian predictions, it is based upon a fundamentally flawed view of human creativity. Each human being, liberated from artificial constraints, contributes to the common weal instead of subtracting from it.

The aging of China’s population will present enormous problems for the country, slowing its economic growth and burdening its creaking social safety net.

Over the last four decades, China has emerged as an economic powerhouse and the world’s factory floor. That transformation led to an increase in life expectancy that contributed to its current situation — more people getting older while fewer babies are born. By 2035, 400 million people in China are expected to be over 60, accounting for nearly a third of its population.

That trend is hastening another worrying event: the day when China will not have enough people of working age to fuel the high-speed growth that made it an engine of the global economy. Labor shortages will also reduce tax revenue and contributions to a pension system that is already under enormous pressure.

The ratio between the younger and older proportions of the population matters a lot. In general younger and older workers serve different roles in the economy, and of course older people outside working age require support from a large working-age population in order to maintain the social insurance system.

Officials have taken steps to try to slow the decline in births. In 2016, they relaxed the one-child policy that had been in place for 35 years, allowing families to have two children. In 2021, they raised the limit to three. Since then, Beijing has offered a range of incentives to couples and small families to encourage them to have children, including cash handouts, tax cuts and even property concessions.

Xi Jinping, China’s top leader, recently made the issue a priority, pledging “a national policy system to boost birthrates.” But in reality, experts said, China’s plunging birth figures reveal an irreversible trend.

None of this should have been a surprise. The one-child policy was always stupid and evil, and no rational government would have kept it in place into the 21st century. Yet because they did, the Chinese government is now in the position of subsidizing people to do things they punished people for just a few years ago.

Societies don’t work that way, though. After decades of anti-natalism, people aren’t going to pop buns out of the oven on demand.

So far, the government’s measures have failed to change the underlying fact that many young Chinese people simply do not want children. They often cite the increasingly high cost of raising them, especially with the economy in a precarious state.

Rachel Zhang, a 33-year-old photographer in Beijing, decided before she married her husband that they would not have children. Sometimes, elders in the family nag them about having a baby.

“I am firm about this,” Ms. Zhang said. “I have never had the desire to have children all along.” The rising costs of raising a child and finding an apartment in a good school district have hardened her resolve.

Modern states–not just China–have been at war with the traditional fundamental unit of society: the family. This has been good for vastly expanding the power of the state, but destructive to the long-term survival of civilization. Success states exist on top of successful societies. Among the many mistakes modern statists have made is the assumption that state planning can substitute for vital social units such as families and religious communities.

The breakdown of millennia-old social orders has happened rapidly, and it will have unpredictable consequences.