Tesla CEO Elon Musk is pictured as he attends the start of the production at Tesla’s “Gigafactory” on March 22, 2022 in Gruenheide, southeast of Berlin. – US electric car pioneer Tesla received the go-ahead for its “gigafactory” in Germany on March 4, 2022. (Patrick Pleul/POOL/AFP via Getty Images)
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Tesla CEO Elon Musk suggests that China could soon be facing a “population collapse” in the aftermath of Beijing’s decades-long population control program that until recently had restricted most families in China to a single offspring.
“Most people still think China has a one-child policy,” he wrote in a June 6 tweet that was pinned to the top of his Twitter account.
“China had its lowest birthdate ever last year, despite having a three-child policy! At current birth rates, China will lose ~40% of people every generation!” he wrote, before adding the grim note: “Population collapse.”
The one-child policy was instituted by the Chinese Communist Party between 1980 and 2015 in a bid to curb a population growth rate that the regime considered too rapid and facilitate economic growth. Violators of the limit were fined, forced to go through abortions or sterilizations, and could potentially lose their jobs.
Until its official abolishment in 2016, the policy had caused some 400 million abortions, accounting for about 28 percent of the nation’s 1.4 billion people, according to official statistics. It also led to child abandonment and infanticide of baby girls due to traditional social preferences for a son.
The decades-long policy has precipitated a demographic crisis in China, marked by a rapidly aging population and falling birth rates. Faced with a looming economic crisis from its dwindling workforce, the Chinese regime allowed two children for couples in 2016 and then increased the limit to three in 2021, as well as providing benefits on childcare, income tax, and housing to support growing families.
Children play at a playground inside a shopping complex in Shanghai on June 1, 2021. (Aly Song/Reuters)
But those measures have done little to convince couples to have more children.
China’s birth rate has been falling for five consecutive years. In 2021, about 7.52 babies were born for every 1,000 people, the lowest level since the regime’s takeover of China in 1949. By contrast, the birth rate for the United States in 2021 was 12 per 1,000 people.
In Guangxi Province, an autonomous region in southern China neighboring Vietnam, authorities in March started allowing married couples to have a fourth child in eight border counties.
But the latest official data from May show that the population of at least 15 Chinese provinces or municipalities, including Beijing, have shrunk, with 11 provinces seeing a decline. That included five provinces where the number of deaths exceeded births for the first time in decades.
Recent demographic studies indicate that the world at large, which currently has about 8 billion people, is confronting a population decline problem.
One of them, published in the medical journal Lancet, predicted that the global human population will peak at 9.7 billion in roughly four decades before starting to decline.
“Once global population decline begins, it will probably continue inexorably,” the authors wrote in a study published in 2020.
The Lancet study projected that by the end of this century, China will have lost 668 million people, or nearly half of its current population.
Musk has been vocal about the consequences of the world’s declining population growth.
Elon Musk (R), Co-founder and CEO of Tesla, and Jack Ma, co-chair of the UN High-Level Panel on Digital Cooperation, speak onstage during the World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC) in Shanghai on Aug. 29, 2019. (Hector Retamal/AFP via Getty Images)
He recently shared a clip taken during the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in 2019, where Musk was seen sitting side by side with billionaire Jack Ma, founder of Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba.
“Assuming there is a benevolent future with AI, I think the biggest problem the world will face in 20 years is population collapse,” he said. “I want to emphasize this: The biggest issue in 20 years will be population collapse. Not explosion. Collapse.”
Ma, in the video, concurred with him. “1.4 billion people in China sounds like a lot, but I think next 20 years, we will see this thing will bring big trouble to China,” Ma said. “The speed of population decrease is going to speed up.”
“Population collapse is the biggest threat to civilization,” wrote Musk in a May 24 tweet accompanying the short clip.