China and everything about it has been an enigma for outsiders. The Communist state felt that it was overpopulated when its population was 987 million and introduced a draconian one-child policy that resulted in tens of millions of forced abortions, the majority of which were female foetuses. Now, when it claims its population is 1400 million, its propaganda machine, aided by song, dance and theatre is prodding women to get married and to get pregnant multiple times in succession. Outside sources say that its population growth was already slowing down when it introduced the population reduction policies. In any totalitarian state, there is a time lag because there is a supreme leader; if there is the slightest doubt that the truth will annoy him, it takes much longer for him to know it.

Now, the state is worried and is doing everything in its powers to persuade women to conceive. The state follows women’s ovulation cycles and when it is time, reminds them to conceive. This is followed by monitoring and a blunt question that became the title of an article in the New York Times on 8 October 2024, “So, are you pregnant yet? China’s in-your-face push for more babies.” Yet, even in this moment of crisis when, unlike Japan, China is growing old before it got rich and is likely to remain stuck in the middle-income-trap forever, China does not want just any babies; it wants Han babies.

China is unmindful of its international image when the question is of defending Xi Jinping’s thoughts, which in case of Xinjiang is to sinicise everything, making it adopt all things Han, language, culture and “thanks, no religion,”. Xi was compelling Uyghur women to have fewer children at a time when the one-child policy had already been revoked and drums were being beaten exhorting Han women to be fruitful and multiply. Uyghur women traditionally had high fertility rates, like their Muslim counterparts elsewhere in the world. In January 2021, the Chinese embassy in the US had no moral compunction in posting, on the then Twitter, now X, a link to the Party mouthpiece, China Daily, which said that China has emancipated Uyghur women who were earlier baby-making machines. In practice, the emancipation comprised forcible sterilisation of Uyghur women. Twitter removed the post saying it violated the rules and China reposted saying that the fall in birth rate was the result of the state’s efforts towards eradicating religious extremism!

The history of self-contradiction by the Chinese Communist Party is long and surprising. The one-child policy was imposed nationwide on 25 September 1980. Decades before that, in 1957, Irene B. Taeuber, had published a research article, “China’s population: riddle of the past, enigma of the future.” After the first-ever census in China in 1953, the state announced on 1 November 1954 that there were 600 million Chinese; they comprised 25 percent of the entire humanity. The Party was alarmed; the official journals of the All-China Federation of Democratic Women and of the Communist Youth League wrote extensively on the need for birth control; contraceptive sales were promoted, traditional Chinese medicines for birth control were publicised and laws on abortion and sterilisation were liberalised. The lack of efficacy of these measures can be seen from the fact that by 1980, the population bloated to 987 million, resulting in the enforcement of one-child policy.

China has been the most populous nation on earth since pre-Biblical times, till India toppled it recently from that pedestal. Yet, at no time in its history, China’s rulers were clear whether the population is an asset or a liability. More glaring was the confusion in the mind of the founder of the Communist state, Mao Zedong. Apparently, before the 1953 census, he had no idea about the size of China’s population; in the 1950s he actively encouraged citizens to have large families saying, “more people means a stronger China.” He banned birth control and abortions and said that a large population was needed to run industries and to defend the country; families were given remuneration, not according to productivity, but by the number of workers. He was shocked by the census results saying, as if the world did not know already, “No country other than China has such a large population. China needs to advocate birth control.” The ambivalence resulted in the population almost doubling during Mao’s rule.

The ambivalence was no less marked in the post-Mao era. On the one hand the party took pride in the large population of China and on the other, it demanded that the provinces strictly enforce the one-child policy. 64 years after Taeuber’s article, an article in 2021 by Neil Howe had almost a similar title, “China’s population: a mystery wrapped in a riddle…” Like the earlier article, this one was also a sequel to a census, the 2020 exercise, the findings of which the Chinese National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) was holding close to its chest. The article said that “some analysts within NBS were whispering that the results for 2020 showed a total population decline from the previous year.” This fall from the pedestal of being the most populous nation went against the earlier boast in January 2020 that the population had pushed over 1400 billion for the first time. The analysts felt that the results were being withheld because “the blow to China’s numero uno self-image will require ‘careful preparation’ and ‘close attention to public reaction.’” After all, the last decline was during Mao’s Great Famine and Xi Jinping did not want to be in that block. It was only three years later, in January 2023, that the state admitted that for the first time after the 1961 famine, the population had declined by close to a million.

The tiny city-state of Singapore has a citizen population of less than four million and it received a lot more FDI than China in 2025. The greatness of empires - Roman, Persian or British - was never a function of population; the position of the US in world affairs is not derived from the size of its population. Chinese leadership’s perpetual ambivalence about population has resulted in a bubble that the state keeps trying to protect. There is literature galore about this obfuscation, including that from Chinese demographers who have migrated just to escape the consequences of saying that the population figures of China are a bubble and the reality is more deflated. One of them is Yi Fuxian, who criticised the one-child policy during its heydays. He was going to be arrested but he fled to the US and in 2007 published the book “Big country with an empty nest”; it was immediately banned in China. By 2013, the CCP had to admit that Yi was stating the obvious and the New York Times reported on 4 November 2015, “Book on family-planning policy is banned, then promoted, by China”; the Chinese government itself republished the book. Yi says that the official population figures are inflated by 130 million and the population may fall to a mere 330 million by 2100, enough to give goose pimples to Xi Jinping.

Like individuals, the greatness of nations does not come from living in denial in larger-than-life bubbles; it comes from the substance and the trustworthiness of their claims as well as threats. China enjoys neither and the bubble is increasingly all too obvious. / DAILY WORLD /

 ( R N prasher is a former IAS officer. The views expressed are his personal.)