All societies are made up of people, and no matter what one says, nothing can ultimately replace the people, for if the people disappear, the society disappears. The tale of every society can be written in this way, that as peoples change or go, societies change and go. Man makes society for himself, not the other way around.
In China, there has been a ‘war’ against fertility that went on until the last decade, where families were legally required to have only one child. The fruits of this rotten policy were already visible in the past as with forced abortions and murdering children, but now are worse because China is having a population and marriage crisis aggravated by an effect of quick modernization, which is the explosion of feminism. There are far more men than women of marriageable age, and not enough women, thus unnaturally raising the value- and expectations -held by the women in their eyes. When one adds to this the allure of foreign- mostly white men from America or Western Europe -it has created a paradise or nightmare, depending on what side you are on. For those who do not care about the future, who are white, or who are women, it has enabled Chinese women an unlimited supply of men who fawn to her needs, while white men can easily hook up with numerous Chinese women without commitment. For Chinese men, it has left millions miserable, without the ability to easily get a mate (especially the poor), and has forced many into severe depression, anger, and rage as a result. It also has very negative long-term effects on society, since if families cannot form, it directly affects the viability of China as a civilization as it would for any other.
As I noted, this is not because of just bad behavior, but behaviors that arose because they were encouraged by the government for temporary gain at the expense of the future, and it is hurting them.
Now as CNN reports, the Chinese government is very concerned because marriage rates in China among Millennials are dropping fast with no recovery seeming in the future.
Su is among a growing number of Chinese millennials who are postponing or eschewing marriage entirely. In just six years, the number of Chinese people getting married for the first time has fallen by a crushing 41%, from 23.8 million in 2013 to 13.9 million in 2019, according to data released by China’s National Bureau of Statistics.
The decline is partly due to decades of policies designed to limit China’s population growth, which mean there are fewer young people in China available to be married, according to Chinese officials and sociologists. But it’s also a result of changing attitudes to marriage, especially among young women, some of whom are growing disillusioned with the institution for its role in entrenching gender inequality, experts say.
In extreme cases, some even took to social media to insult wives as being a “married donkey,” a derogatory term used to describe submissive women who conform to patriarchal rules within marriage, said Xiao Meili, a leading voice in China’s feminist movement.
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The declining marriage rate is a problem for Beijing.
Getting young people to have children is central to its efforts to avert a looming population crisis that could severely distress its economic and social stability — and potentially pose a risk to Chinese Communist Party rule.
“Marriage and reproduction are closely related. The decline in the marriage rate will affect the birth rate, which in turn affects economic and social developments,” Yang Zongtao, an official with the Ministry of Civil Affairs, said at a news conference last year.
“This (issue) should be brought to the forefront,” he said, adding that the ministry will “improve relevant social policies and enhance propaganda efforts to guide the public to establish positive values on love, marriage and family.”
In 2019, China’s marriage rate plunged for the sixth year in a row to 6.6 per 1,000 people — a 33% drop from 2013 and the lowest level in 14 years, according to data from the Ministry of Civil Affairs.
Chinese officials have attributed the decline to a drop in the number of people of marriageable age, due to the one-child policy, a deliberate strategy introduced in 1979 to control China’s population.
But demographers have been warning for years of a looming population crisis. In 2014, the country’s working-age population started to shrink for the first time in more than three decades, alarming Chinese leaders.
The next year, the Chinese government announced an end to the one-child policy, allowing couples to have two children. It went into force on January 1, 2016, but both marriage and birth rates have dropped anyway. Between 2016 and 2019, birth declined from 13 per 1,000 people to 10 — a trend not helped by the fact women are emancipating and millennials have different values. (source)
What is one to say? People warned about this for decades, and now the fruits of these decisions are coming true.
China is a strong nation, but a major trend in Chinese history is towards self-destruction, and this will be important to watch for, because her actions have made it so that she is rising at the same time she is falling apart, and if trends hold, when a major war happens, she may be able to hold something of her own for a time, but will eventually fail for this reason.
This marriage situation is a part of it. If China cannot have families, who will occupy her? If her historical trends say anything, just as in the past, it will be once again foreign occupiers.
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