China's birthrate fell 10% last year to its lowest level on record, a significant drop in spite of extensive efforts by the CCP to encourage people to get busy.

The country had just 9.56 million births in 2022, the lowest figure since they began keeping records in 1949, according to a report by the National Health Commission.

The high costs of child care and education, growing unemployment and job insecurity as well as gender discrimination have all helped to deter many young couples from having more than one child or even having children at all. -NBC News

China's population also fell for the first time in six decades, dropping to 1.41 billion people - a demographic shift that's caused officials to worry that the country will 'get old before it gets rich' - with a slowing economy and declining tax receipts amid increases in government debt due to soaring health and welfare costs.

According to the report, the demographic downturn is largely thanks to China's one-child policy imposed between 1980 and 2015. Nearly 40% of Chinese babies last year were the second child of a married couple, while 15% were from families with three or more children.

The sharp decline in births comes despite Beijing's efforts to increase child care and provide other financial incentives. In May, President Xi Jinping presided over a panel to study the topic.

Not just China

As we noted in June, Japan's birth rate has also plummeted to a record low for the seventh straight year, with the number of babies born falling below 800,000 this year, health ministry data showed on June 2.

The number of newborns in Japan fell to 770,747 this year, down 40,875 from the previous year and the lowest since the country began record-keeping in 1899, Kyodo News reported, citing health ministry data.

Japan’s fertility rate—the average number of children born to a woman in her lifetime—fell from 1.30 in 2021 to 1.26 last year, equivalent to the previous low recorded in 2005. The number is far below the 2.07 rate necessary to sustain a stable population.

The decline in Japan’s birth rate is attributed to people delaying parenthood due to the economic impact brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as the prevailing trend among couples to delay marriage, according to the report.

The US birthrate has also been in decline, falling slightly in 2022 compared to 2021, with roughly 3.7 million babies born nationwide. It still hasn't recovered to pre-pandemic levels according to the CDC.

And as Mike Shedlock noted two years ago.

More via Mish Talk, worth a review:

The Pandemic Caused a Baby Bust, Not a Boom

Scientific American reports The Pandemic Caused a Baby Bust, Not a Boom

When the COVID pandemic led to widespread economic shutdowns and stay-at-home orders in the spring of 2020, many media outlets and pundits speculated this might lead to a baby boom. But it appears the opposite has happened: birth rates declined in many high-income countries amid the crisis, a new study shows.

Arnstein Aassve, a professor of social and political sciences at Bocconi University in Italy, and his colleagues looked at birth rates in 22 high-income countries, including the U.S., from 2016 through the beginning of 2021. They found that seven of these countries had statistically significant declines in birth rates in the final months of 2020 and first months of 2021, compared with the same period in previous years. Hungary, Italy, Spain and Portugal had some of the largest drops: reductions of 8.5, 9.1, 8.4 and 6.6 percent, respectively. The U.S. saw a decline of 3.8 percent, but this was not statistically significant—perhaps because the pandemic’s effects were more spread out in the country and because the study only had U.S. data through December 2020, Aassve says. The findings were published on Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA.

Birth rates fluctuate seasonally within a year, and many of the countries in the study had experienced falling rates for years before the pandemic. But the declines that began nine months after the World Health Organization declared a public health emergency on January 30, 2020, were even more stark. “We are very confident that the effect for those countries is real,” Aassve says. “Even though they might have had a bit of a mild downward trend [before], we’re pretty sure about the fact that there was an impact of the pandemic.”

Covid Accelerated the Existing Trend

Covid accelerated the already declining birth rates. 

Given the 16-year lag between births and the civilian noninstitutional population coupled with the aging of the workforce there will be fewer and fewer workers supporting retired workers on Social Security. 

Notice the relatively steep decline in the birth rate starting in 2008 and continuing through today. 

That impact will start showing up in 2024 and last a minimum of 12 years.

How long depends on whether the birth rate picks up after Covid. I highly doubt the birth rate will pick up.

Deflationary and Inflationary Impacts

1. Inflationary: Shortage of workers increases wage pressures
2. Deflationary: Fewer workers support an increasing number of retirees
3. Deflationary: Older workers need more assistance, buy fewer things, travel less. 
4. Deflationary: More government debt and deficits. Government spending has a negative impact on real GDP.

*  *  *

Time for another sexual revolution?

Authored by Jonathan Miltmore via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Few directors in Hollywood have more power than Martin Scorsese, the Oscar-winning director of box office hits such as "Goodfellas," "Casino," "The Departed," and "The Wolf of Wall Street."

But even the legendary filmmaker lacked the clout to save the fate of his movie "Kundun" (1997) when the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) came knocking on Disney’s door.

The film is probably one that most readers have never heard of, even though it was nominated for four Academy Awards and included the legendary Mr. Scorsese. A historical drama written by Melissa Mathison, "Kundun" explores the life of the young Dalai Lama, who in 1950 saw his homeland of Tibet invaded by the CCP.

Ms. Mathison conceived the project after meeting the Dalai Lama in 1990, and although she had concerns that Hollywood wouldn't be interested in such a film, she caught a break when she convinced Mr. Scorsese to direct the film.

“I’m not saying he wants to do it, but I know he’s going to get it,” Ms. Mathison recalled thinking. “I knew he’d understand the society, the moral code, the journey, and the spirituality of it,” she said in the documentary "In Search of Kundun with Martin Scorsese."

Disney eventually agreed to distribute the film, which was given a $28 million budget. But China had other ideas.

Tibet, along with Taiwan and Tiananmen, is among the forbidden Three Ts—the issues considered most contentious by the CCP. So with China becoming an emerging global power in the 1990s, the CCP decided to flex its muscle and attempted to nix the project.

Two days into the production of "Kundun" in 1996, a representative from the Chinese Embassy approached Disney's chief strategic officer, Lawrence Murphy.

“The Chinese have bombed the monastery of Lithang. It has been destroyed,” an adviser tells the Dalai Lama at one point in the movie. “Nuns and monks are made to fornicate in the streets. They put guns in the hands of Khumba children and force the child to kill the parents.”

While the description is horrifying, even more moving is the scene in which an elderly Tibetan woman tearfully and frantically insists that she's “happy and prosperous under the Chinese Communist Party.”

This isn't exactly flattering stuff for the CCP, any more than "Schindler’s List" is for the Nazis. Yet history isn't always pretty.

In any event, the CCP’s decision to lean on the film left Disney CEO Michael Eisner in a pickle.

If Mr. Eisner shut down the film, he’d anger Mr. Scorsese and look weak for caving to the CCP. If he proceeded with production, he risked losing Disney’s commercial and manufacturing foothold in China, as well as the 1.4 billion potential consumers.

So Mr. Eisner opted for a third way. He allowed the shooting of "Kundun" to proceed, but he limited the film’s distribution and marketing. "Kundun" was released on Christmas Day in 1997—in two theaters nationwide.

In other words, in the contest over truth and creative freedom versus government censorship, Disney blinked, and film producer Matt Tabor describes what Disney’s decision meant going forward.

“If foreign companies wanted access to [China’s] market, they were going to play by China’s rules,” Mr. Tabor noted in a recent production by the Foundation for Economic Education on the showdown. “'Kundun' marked the first opportunity for China to flex that muscle in the movie business.”

“These films are full of inaccuracies,” a Chinese official told The Washington Post. “That’s why they are not popular within China.”

“We made a stupid mistake in releasing 'Kundun.' This film was a form of insult to our friends. The bad news is that the film was made; the good news is that nobody watched it. Here I want to apologize, and in the future, we should prevent this sort of thing, which insults our friends, from happening. In short, we’re a family entertainment company, a company that uses silly ways to amuse people.”

Mr. Eisner’s complete capitulation would have a profound impact on the global entertainment landscape for years to come. It explains why "Kundun" can’t be streamed on Amazon or Netflix even today. It explains why NBA executives go apoplectic when a single general manager tweets his support of protesters in Hong Kong.

One can appreciate the tough situation that Mr. Eisner was in without agreeing with his decision to banish "Kundun" to Siberia. Companies have commercial interests, and balancing those against doing the right thing or supporting creative expression isn't always easy. Indeed, this balancing act existed before Disney banished "Kundun," evidenced by one executive’s stated reason for passing on the film.

“I don’t need to have my spirits and wine business thrown out of China,” Edgar Bronfman Jr.—the CEO of Seagram, which briefly owned Universal Pictures—replied when pitched on "Kundun."

Yet, the message of Disney’s showdown with China isn’t really about the ethics of dealing with a powerful communist regime. The real lesson is that we should prevent governments from amassing such dictatorial power in the first place, and remind ourselves that governments are hardly arbiters of truth. Indeed, if the past few years have taught us anything, it’s that government officials have no business deciding what's true and what's false—even though it’s a power they clearly desire.

The reality is that those who wish to censor speech are usually far more interested in power than truth—the CCP’s attempt to censor "Kundun" reinforces that idea—and reminds us that sometimes the best way to exercise freedom is to watch a movie they don’t want you to see.

Matt Tabor contributed to this article.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.