POLICY’S LONG SHADOW

China’s demographic anxiety is not a sudden policy headache but a recurring civilizational dilemma.

- 

For millennia, numbers have been both China’s greatest strength and its deepest source of unease. An enormous population has long underwritten imperial reach, labour power, and national confidence, even as governing elites worried about scarcity, disorder, and control. That tension ran straight through the revolutionary era. When Mao Zedong warned in 1957 that China's 600 million people must never be forgotten, it was not reverence but apprehension that framed the remark. Soon after came policies and campaigns that contributed to famine and mass suffering, a grim reminder that managing “the masses” has always been as perilous as it is central to Chinese statecraft. Today's birthrate figures — the lowest since 1949 — revive the same paradox in reverse. China still has over 1.4 billion people, yet for the first time in its modern history, the fear is not too many mouths, but too few young ones to sustain economic ambition, social care, and geopolitical stature.