“The Chinese Communist Party's real estate sector is in the process of collapsing right now … The real estate sector, the property sector of the Chinese economy is about 60 percent of the economy, it's where much of the wealth of the Chinese people is invested. And that wealth is going to disappear overnight.”
To understand the root causes of China’s economic crisis and what its impact will be, I sit down with China expert Steven Mosher, president of the Population Research Institute.
Besides its economic woes, China is also facing a demographic disaster. Even though the One-Child Policy has ended and the Chinese regime is desperately trying to encourage pregnancies, “there’s no way out of that demographic trap that the Chinese Communist Party has set for the Chinese people,” Mr. Mosher says.
Watch the clip:
“Regardless of what mix of economic incentives the government puts in place, regardless of how much they lower the interest rates or try to subsidize exports or engage in any of the other things that they would like to do, they can't make up for 400 million missing people.”
🔴 WATCH the full episode (54 minutes) on Epoch Times: https://ept.ms/S1026StevenMosher
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Jan Jekielek: Steven Mosher, such a pleasure to have you back on American Thought Leaders.
Steven Mosher: It's good to be with you today, Jan. You do important work.
Mr. Jekielek: I appreciate that. It has been way too long since we last spoke, and it's been four years since you were on the show. You were one of the earlier guests on the show when American Thought Leaders first began back in 2019. We talked about your area of expertise, which is the demographic realities around China and Chinese Communist Party policy.
We're going to talk about that today, but first, let’s talk about how this intersects with the current harsh realities of the real estate market in China.
Mr. Mosher: The Chinese Communist Party's real estate sector is in the process of collapsing right now, and its collapse has taken longer than some of us expected. But when it happens, and it's beginning to happen now, it will take place much more quickly than anyone anticipated. The real estate sector of the Chinese economy is about 60 percent of the economy. It's where much of the wealth of the Chinese people is invested, and that wealth is going to disappear overnight.
But what I really would like to start with, Jan, is how this works at the local level. I was in China back in 1980. I was the first American social scientist allowed on the ground in China to actually live and work among the villagers in China who were then living in people's communes that were dissolved the year after I left.
I have been back many times since then. But my affection and my love for the Chinese people, especially for people living in the countryside, has never waned. I've always been fighting for them. Of course, they are the chief victims of the Chinese Communist Party. Everyone in China, aside from Communist Party members, is a victim of the Chinese Communist Party. But the people in the cities have been treated a lot better than the people in the countryside.
Here's what happens in the countryside on the property side of the equation. You will have local officials coming in from the township, the county-level government, or even the next level up, which is the perpetual level, saying, "We are going to raze this village to the ground and we are going to build an apartment complex on the ground where it stood."
They will give the local villagers little or nothing in compensation for destroying their houses and taking their land. That's why we frequently see riots in China that are put down by the Communist Party's riot police as people quite rightly object to having their homes destroyed.
This is how it works. It's really a scam on the part of these local Communist officials. They will go to a local builder and a local bank and say, "We have this plot of land." They won't say they stole it from the peasants, but they did. "We have this plot of land and we would like the construction company to build a high rise apartment building on it, and we would like you, the local people's bank, to loan us the money to do that."
They all meet in a back room somewhere and work out how to split the cash and the proceeds. The expectation is that these poor villagers who have had their homes destroyed will have no choice but to buy apartments to live in, because otherwise they would be homeless.
Who benefits from this? It is the local officials at the bank and the construction company and the local communist officials who are all on the take. Who suffers from this? It’s the villagers who have suffered twice. Not only do they have their homes destroyed, they are then virtually forced by local officials to buy into this apartment complex and further enrich the corrupt communist officials.
That's how the property scam works on the local level. You can magnify that to the prefectural level, to the provincial level, and to the national level. You can see how companies like Evergrande got to be the size that they are today.
You can see how this is a giant Ponzi scheme and now China has overbuilt. They've got 70 or 80 million empty apartment buildings. This is a stock that would take a generation to sell down, even if they built nothing new, and there are now too few people to buy those apartment buildings.
The economy, this giant Ponzi scheme built on this type of real estate development, is in the middle of collapsing right before our very eyes. That's why Evergrande has begun to declare bankruptcy and can no longer issue bonds, because no one will buy their junk bonds to build apartment buildings that no one will ever occupy.
Mr. Jekielek: There's another element that we typically hear about, which is about the people actually investing in these apartments. On the one hand there is this appropriation, this taking of the land, and the building of these high rises and forcing people to buy in. The more well-known piece is the investment piece. Please tell me how that fits into the equation here.
Mr. Mosher: I was talking about the 500 million people in the countryside and how this overbuilding occurs and how local corrupt officials take advantage of it. In the cities, it works somewhat differently, because the people in the cities are not generally going to have their homes destroyed in order to force them to buy new ones.
There is a lack of investment opportunities in China, because people don't trust the stock market, which they think quite rightly is rigged by the government to produce certain returns and certain results. Everything can disappear overnight if the government regulations change or if the government comes in and expropriates the company. The people in the cities really only have one investment they can make with the money they're trying to save, and that is an investment in an apartment building.
But they're not buying a completed apartment, and here's where the scam is. They're buying on speculation that next year they will be the owners of an apartment building, which actually has yet to be built. They put down a lot of money by way of down payments. They're paying a construction company to construct an apartment building in real time with their investment.
This is now happening all over China in city, after city, after city. An apartment building will be half-constructed, and maybe the concrete walls and the roof are on, but none of the interior work has been completed. That is because the builder is going bankrupt, much like Evergrande, the second-largest developer in the country, is going bankrupt. What happens then?
All of those thousands of people who invested their life savings in this dream apartment, will see their dream turn into a nightmare. They've lost their money. That's why in the cities we see gatherings of people outside of real estate development companies, outside of local banks, and outside of local party official offices protesting against what is actually the theft of their life savings.
That is what happens in the cities. In the countryside, it's out-and-out expropriation and theft. In the cities, it's more subtle. But at the end of the day, you achieve the same end. You impoverish the people, and you enrich the Chinese Communist Party.
Mr. Jekielek: You describe this and other aspects of how the CCP treats its people as wanton destruction of human capital. That's very interesting and let’s explore that. But the common mantra that you hear again and again in legacy media and that is accepted as fact, is that the Chinese Communist Party has lifted millions upon millions of people out of poverty. They have this success, but despite this success, there are these problems. How does that square with your description of this wanton destruction of human capital?
Mr. Mosher: The Chinese people have lifted themselves out of poverty. The Chinese people are the most industrious, intelligent people on the face of the Earth. Given half a chance they will improve their surroundings, and they will improve their living standards for themselves and their families. Under the reforms that succeeded the death of Mao Zedong and with the rise of Deng Xiaoping, the Chinese people were given that half a chance.
The Chinese people's communes were dissolved, and farmers were given their land back to farm their own crops and make profits from doing so. People in the cities were allowed to start small businesses and even larger enterprises. The Chinese Communist Party fed off all of this and took a large part of the wealth that was generated.
As you probably know, the Chinese Communist Party's operations take about one sixth of the GDP [Gross Domestic Product] of the country every year. It is to pay the salaries of Communist Party officials and to provide them with housing, free meals, transportation, foreign junkets, and exclusive resorts in China. Another one sixth of the economy is taken by corruption. It's easily one sixth, and it may be more. Together, that is one third of the Chinese economy disappearing into the pockets and the overseas bank accounts of the Chinese Communist Party.
But even with those headwinds, even with the corruption, and even with the oppression, the Chinese people were able to improve their lot. Those days are now over because Xi Jinping is a committed communist. He is expropriating the wealth of billionaires. The most dangerous place to be a billionaire in the world today, unless your name is Donald Trump, is to be a billionaire in China.
They have been arrested, and they have been suicided. They tend to jump off the 14th story of a high rise apartment building, committing suicide. There are all kinds of ways in which Chinese Communist Party officials are now expropriating the wealth that very intelligent and hardworking, entrepreneurially-minded Chinese have managed to accumulate over the last few decades. Again, this ends badly. If you destroy the wealth-creating class of the country, you destroy the economy of the country.
The other thing that enabled China's rise was the United States. Without U.S. financing, without access to the U.S. domestic consumer market, the largest market in the world, and without U.S. technology, stolen in most cases, China would not have been able to develop. I attribute the improvement in the living standards of the Chinese people to the hardworking Chinese people themselves, combined with the rather foolish foreign policy of the United States for the last few decades of enabling the rise of a Chinese Communist Party that wants to dominate not only its own people, but the whole world.
Mr. Jekielek: That is true. You're going way back to the policies of the Great Leap Forward. I've heard many different estimates of the death toll from the policies of the Great Leap Forward. They're in the tens of millions of unnatural deaths, with cannibalism and all of these very extreme situations. Rising from that is not difficult in a sense, as long as you change really terrible policy.
Mr. Mosher: I was living in Junan Commune in the Pearl River delta of Guangdong province, about 80 miles up the Pearl River from Hong Kong. I speak, read and write Chinese Mandarin and Cantonese, and I got to know the people in the village. They told me that their lives were worse under communist rule than they had been before the revolution. They proved that by taking me out to a graveyard in the countryside where 400 people from the village were buried.
These were all people who died in the famine after the Great Leap Forward, which destroyed agricultural production, which diverted manpower that should have been planting and harvesting crops, and that should have been building dams on the Pearl River, which promptly washed away during the spring rains. The 400 people from my village of a couple of thousand people were those who had perished in 1960, 1961, and early 1962 as a result of the biggest man made famine in human history.
The estimate that I use, Jan, is more than tens of millions—it is actually about 50 million. That estimate comes from Chen Yichu, the former head of the Institute for Agrarian Reform in China under the old Communist Party dictator, Zhao Ziyang, decades ago. He surveyed all of the provinces of China and put together the estimate of 50 million people. That's just part of the death toll caused by the Chinese Communist Party.
It was a result of Mao's policies and his drive towards overnight communization of the economy, which simply destroyed agriculture and led to the deaths of tens of millions. People in the cities didn't die in those numbers, they tightened their belts. But in the countryside, entire villages were wiped out. There are villages that no longer exist in China because every living soul died in 1960 and 1961.
Mr. Jekielek: Please lay out for me how the CCP enacts this wanton destruction of human capital, again in the context of the very significant economic growth since that time.
Mr. Mosher: When I was in China, the one-child policy began. Hands down, that was the largest destruction of human capital that the world has ever seen. Up until a few years ago, Communist Party leaders in China were actually bragging about having eliminated 400 million people from the Chinese population through forced abortion. In fact, back in 2012, in Washington DC, I was in a meeting with the former Minister of Health of the People's Republic of China, who claimed that number of births had been averted by the one-child policy.
Now it turns out that you can't kill off 400 million of the most productive, enterprising, hard working people on the planet without doing severe damage to your economy over time. That is in fact what has happened. Not only is the loss of all those children a huge human tragedy, so is the forced abortions and sterilization of all of those women, who suffered greatly mentally and physically.
But think about what that means now in terms of 70 million empty apartment buildings. The young men and women who would have married and started families and purchased those apartment buildings perhaps were killed decades ago. You cannot bring them back to life now.
By killing off half of the last two generations, the Chinese Communist Party has killed off its future, literally. The only future that a family has is its children, and the only future that a nation has are its families and its children. The Chinese Communist Party, by far the biggest killing machine in human history, has killed off China's economic future by means of 35 years of the one-child policy.
They didn't wake up to that fact until 2016. That policy effectively went into place in Guangdong Province in 1980 when I was first there, and it ended in 2016. Why? Because the Chinese Communist Party woke up to the fact that at that time it had a labor shortage of 4.1 million workers in the country. How do you create a labor shortage in the most populous country on earth? Killing off 400 million people will pretty much put you in that position.
Since then, the Chinese Communist Party has been making increasingly desperate efforts to get the birth rate up. They announced a two-child policy in 2016, expecting a baby boom. They got a little tiny boomlet and then the birth rate continued to fall. It was a year-and-a-half ago they announced that they were moving to a three-child policy.
They said to the Chinese people, the surviving young men and young women who had survived the one-child policy, "You can now be fruitful and multiply." The young people in China said, "No, we're not interested. You've told us for almost four decades that children are expensive, and that we should stop at one child. Now, you're telling us that we should have two or three. We're not interested."
Marriage rates continue to decline in China and the birth rate continues to decline. The birth rate now is probably the lowest that we have seen in China over the last century. There were fewer than 10 million babies born in China last year. Even though there are very few forced abortions now in China, except for among minorities and persecuted groups, there are now many more abortions in China than there are live births, which again does not bode well for the future of the country.
It's astonishing to me that Deng Xiaoping fell for the Western idea of overpopulation back in 1980 and announced a one-child policy, thinking that was going to be the high road to economic development, to China joining the first rank of nations, and to the Communist Party being empowered by economic growth to build a military capable of dominating the world.
They thought that in the 1980s. Now, they're beginning to realize that they have in effect strangled in the cradle the China dream of world domination. Because with China's economy on the downturn, with China's population aging and dying more rapidly than any human population has in the history of the planet, the 21st century will not belong to China, in part because of the continued misrule of the Chinese Communist Party.
But in large part it’s because of the killing off of half of the last two generations. I've made projections looking into the future that show that by 2070 or maybe as early as 2060, the population of the United States will probably be larger than that of the population of China.
Communist parties always kill. Sometimes they kill slowly, and sometimes they kill quickly by execution. The one-child policy has been a slow death warrant for the Chinese people. By the end of this coming century, if the birth rate stays at around one per woman over her reproductive lifetime, we're looking at only having about 400 million Chinese alive down from 1.4 billion today. That's the achievement of the Chinese Communist Party—the killing off of the majority of the Chinese people over time.
Mr. Jekielek: There's a whole school of thought in the West that would say that's a good thing, a Malthusian view of the world. I want to talk about that in a moment. Before we go there, please tell me about these statistics. Both you and I know, statistics coming out of the Chinese regime mean very little. Can you explain to me how you get your statistics, including that projection that you've just made?
Mr. Mosher: Here's what the government is saying, and the Chinese Communist Party's statistics are always massaged for propaganda purposes, so you have to read between the lines. In fact, sometimes what they claim is exactly the opposite of the truth. In 2016, when they ended the one-child policy, they predicted that the total fertility rate, that is the number of babies born to every woman over her reproductive lifetime, would increase to 1.8 children, still below the replacement rate.
Replacement rate fertility is 2.1 children. With 2.1 children, you have zero population growth over time. The population basically stabilizes. It doesn't grow, and it doesn't shrink. Then 1.8 would still be below replacement rate fertility, but it would be much better than it had been.
But China's birth rate did not recover, and it continued to fall. The number of births that the government reports in 2022, and again, this comes from a Chinese Communist Party State Statistical Bureau, is 9.56 million children born. The State Statistical Bureau has now admitted that China has one of the lowest birth rates in the world. The official figure is 1.09 children per woman, let's just say about one child per woman over her reproductive lifetime.
The fact they would admit that number, Jan, means that the real number is probably lower. The real number is probably lower than one. I say that because if you look at Hong Kong, the birth rate now in Hong Kong is 0.8 child per woman. That's less than one child per woman over a reproductive lifetime. and that's where China's population is headed.
The other thing I would say is the population of China is smaller than the 1.4 billion claimed. I say that because officials at all levels get subsidies from the central government based on how many people they have under their control. Schools get subsidies based on how many students they have, and hospitals get subsidies based on how many patients they have. Everyone has an incentive to exaggerate the numbers to increase the number of state subsidies.
If you look at real enrollment numbers later on in high school and in college, you see that the numbers of students enrolled are smaller than what you would expect from the official numbers. The population of China is somewhat below 1.4 billion even now. Clearly, there has been a systematic exaggeration of the number of births in China over the last few decades.
For the first time since Mao Zedong's great famine in 1961, where we talked about 50 million people dying, China's population is actually decreasing from year to year. China is filling fewer cradles than coffins today, and that's a sad, sad fact. That means the demographic dividend that you got from having very few children, and from young people staying in the workforce, especially young women, contributed to China's rapid economic growth. It contributed to the military buildup, and it contributed to its strategic expansion. That demographic dividend is gone. Instead, as the number of working age people declines, we will see labor costs go up. China hasn't transitioned to a rich country yet. It is still a middle income country.
You can say, “Japan got old, South Korea got old, and Taiwan got old." A lot of countries in the world have gotten old over time. We see that in Europe as well. But all of those countries got rich before they grew old. They grew rich before they grew old, which meant they had the resources to continue to prosper even as the population was aging and the workforce was starting to level out and shrink.
China doesn't have that luxury. China is still a middle income country, and it is still relatively poor. Hundreds of millions of people are still relatively poor in China. China is growing old before it grew rich, and there's no way out of that demographic trap that the Chinese Communist Party has set for the Chinese people.
This is a baby bust, and that explains why China's economy will have a hard time recovering from its current problems, regardless of what mix of economic incentives the government puts in place. Regardless of how much they lower the interest rates or try to subsidize exports or engage in any of the other things that they would like to do, they can't make up for 400 million missing people. They can't make up for a hundred million empty cradles. That resource which is the ultimate resource, the human being, cannot be replaced. It is irreplaceable.
Mr. Jekielek: In line with your description of this wanton destruction of human capital, according to the Chinese Communist Party, human beings can be used at will, as fodder for development or for whatever the purpose the CCP may deem necessary. What you're describing is a very scary situation. I wonder what extreme methods they might cook up to deal with this intractable problem.
Mr. Mosher: Yes, you're absolutely right. The Chinese Communist Party has always treated the Chinese masses, and I've never liked the term masses, because that's dehumanizing in itself, but they've always treated the Chinese masses as a kind of inexhaustible resource that they could squander at will. They think, "We're going to build communism tomorrow, and it doesn't matter if we kill 10 or 20 percent of the population off. We're headed for paradise." Actually, it does matter over time. I'm sure that neither Deng Xiaoping nor Xi Jinping ever imagined the one-child policy would result in the death of the China dream, but it has.
Let's talk more about the numbers and then let's talk about what the Chinese Communist Party might do in the extreme when it really gets pushed into a corner by the demographic trap that it set for itself. If you crunch the numbers as I have, and see that the population birth rate stabilizes at 1.1 child per woman, then the population of China declines to 440 million by 2100, less than the current population of the U.S.
If the unwillingness of young Chinese women to get married and have children continues, which is happening in real time, and the birth rate falls to 0.8, which is where it is in Hong Kong, then there will only be 310 million people alive in China by the end of the century. You can see what I mean when I say China's demographic collapse is coming.
What will the Chinese Communist Party do? It has already tried to start increasing the birth rate. Just a couple of weeks ago, the chairman of the Central Military Commission, Xi Jinping, who is the chairman of everything in China, said that the members of the People's Liberation Army are now being encouraged to have three children. Now, they use the word encourage.
But of course what that means in practice is that it is an order. Your commander-in-chief says, "Be fruitful and multiply.” If you have children, then your promotions are going to be pegged to whether or not you obey that command. With the group that is most immediately under his control, Xi has already ordered them to have three children to stave off the demographic collapse.
In fact, several years ago, the Communist Party itself had announced that young Communist Party members should marry and have at least two children, and that has now been increased to three. Again, the people under their control, the party members, are being told they must have children.
The other sign of the times is that the government is now setting up sperm banks throughout China and encouraging young men to donate their sperm. They haven't set up egg banks yet, and maybe that's coming. Young women could be told to donate their eggs for in vitro fertilization and raising test tube babies, experiments for which we know are going on in China today.
But I'm afraid that what they will do is a simpler solution technologically. Young women will not be told to donate their eggs. They'll be told to donate their uterus and themselves. They will be told that for the good of the country, for the good of China's prosperity, and for the good of the future of China, they must consent to have children. There will be quotas announced and there will be penalties for not obeying. If all that sounds like something that no government would ever do to its people, you have to remember that's exactly what the Chinese Communist Party did to young women for 35 years.
They told young women who got pregnant before the age of 21 that they must get an abortion. They told young women who got pregnant before they were married that they must get an abortion. They told young women who were married, but conceived a child outside of the quota system without the permission of the government, that they must get an abortion. They told young women who had one child that they must now be sterilized.
In a top-down fashion, China has controlled the fertility of the country for decades, in order to drive down the fertility. What would stand in the way of the Chinese Communist Party from doing the opposite—using young women as a captive reproductive force to repopulate the country, now that they have effectively sent it in a downward spiral demographically? I can't see any moral reasons or any ethical reasons why the Communist Party would hesitate to do that for a minute.
In 1958, Chairman Mao himself said, "We plan the production of steel, we plan the production of coal, but we don't plan the reproduction of people. We should set up a state agency to control reproduction in the same way that we control production."
That little snippet of his speech was edited out of his collective works, but we now know it existed. Mao's idea back in the 1950s was that you need to control reproduction in the same way you control production. If you need fewer babies, you abort. If you need more babies, you forcibly impregnate. Before the end of the century, and maybe before the end of this decade, we will see forced pregnancy in one form or another in China. It's a logical outcome of the situation that they are in.
Mr. Jekielek: This speaks to this hubris of total control, imagining you can control human beings in such draconian ways. It's a logical corollary to everything that's been done up to now. There is a recent piece by Ashley Rindsberg in Tablet Magazine about Western journalists and scientific minds believing statistics coming out of China. Specifically, I'm thinking about the Covid death toll, which was stuck at 5,000 for a long time. This helped to endorse some of these horrific zero-Covid lockdown policies, which have had such a terrible toll on society.
Mr. Mosher: Absolutely. The Chinese Communist Party lies with their published statistics. With the outbreak of Covid-19 in Wuhan, as far back as September of 2019, they lied for months about its existence. They failed to reveal for months the existence of a new and deadly coronavirus that was out and about in the population.
When they finally admitted they had a problem on or around January 1st, 2020, they told the visiting head of the World Health Organization,Tedros Ghebreyesus, that it was under control, and that they only had a few cases. They said that they were effectively treating them by putting those people who were ill with Covid on respirators and using Remdesivir and some other drugs, which have proved not to be as effective as originally claimed.
They claimed great success in dealing with the coronavirus epidemic, at the same time that they were sending plane loads of people who were potentially infected with the coronavirus to places like Milan, Rome, Madrid, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, effectively spreading a highly infectious respiratory virus around the world.
Because they claimed their own death rate was so low due to their effective quarantines, zero-Covid policy, and locking people in their apartments, the rest of the world, led by Dr. Anthony Fauci, believed that China had the magic solution to containing Covid and tried to adopt the same policies in the United States.
I actually wrote a book about this, Jan, called, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Pandemics, in which I showed that Fauci, the CDC, the FDA, and other agencies were modeling their response to the coronavirus epidemic on China's supposedly successful strategy. Of course, it wasn't successful at all.
We knew in real time in March and April of 2020 about the smokestacks of the crematoria in Wuhan. There were 14 crematoria in and around the city of Wuhan, the epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic, that were going day and night. Those ovens were going day and night to cremate the bodies of those who had died from coronavirus.
The official death toll of a few hundred, then becoming a few thousand was nonsense. There were tens of thousands of deaths. In April 2020 I wrote a piece saying at least 50 to 60,000 people had died in Wuhan alone, and that it was spreading beyond Wuhan to the province of Hubei and other cities in China in real time.
Their numbers were clearly fabricated. The incredible naivete of some of our scientists in looking to China for a solution to contain what was basically an uncontainable, highly transmissible, airborne respiratory virus makes absolutely no sense at all, unless they were trying to distract attention from their own failures in handing over the technology and the funding to allow China to develop this thing in the first place.
That's the conclusion that I was forced to reach. A lot of people in the years since have come to that same conclusion. We should never look to China and the Chinese Communist Party for advice on anything, least of all for a model on how to treat an infectious disease which came from China.
Mr. Jekielek: The death toll from Covid was much, much greater early on. Some people in the health freedom movement believed that it was purely propaganda coming out of China deliberately, that convinced the West to follow these draconian policies. But it's more similar to what you just said. Some leaders in the West have an admiration for the CCP’s ability to control. There is also an inability to see the incredible failures that have come out of a totalitarian structure like communist China. That seems to me to be the real lesson. We need to understand that they have this mentality that people aren't really human beings. What would you expect from this mentality? The West doesn’t truly understand this yet.
Mr. Mosher: No, I don't think it is understood by the majority of people. However, the globalists and the elites have understood the lesson quite well. With China's zero-Covid policies, they see an ability to totally control a population, to indeed lock them in their apartment buildings while they starve to death or run out of vital medications and die from disease, or in despair throw themselves off their balconies as they're starving to death.
The zero-Covid policies in China, which were again illustrated just last year when they locked down 20 some million people in Shanghai in their apartments, is really an expression of the total control that the Chinese Communist Party has been striving for since its founding back in 1921.
It found its fullest expression in the zero-Covid policies, which I have written about. They are not just an expression of totalitarianism perfected, but they are also a preparation for war. Because in a wartime scenario, you would like the ability to lock everyone on their job sites to keep them producing weapons or vital foodstuffs, or to lock everyone in their apartments to prevent them from engaging in popular demonstrations, riots, or unrest.
With the zero-Covid policies, which killed a lot more people than the weaker variant of the coronavirus did in Shanghai at that time last year, the head of the lockdown in Shanghai was actually promoted to be a member of the Standing Committee of the Politburo of Xi Jinping. Why? Because he followed orders and was willing to kill his own people in order to do the bidding of the supreme leader of the Chinese Communist Party.
Every would-be dictator in the world; every Leftist, every Marxist, every communist, and everyone who hungered for more control and power looked at the Chinese model and found a perfect justification for imposing controls on their own people. We saw that in New Zealand, where the former Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, locked down the entire country, forbade people from going out of their homes for months on end, and forbade people from going to funerals for loved ones who had died. She was encouraging neighbors to report on each other if they saw anyone leaving the perimeter of their house and their yard. This draconian lockdown really had no equal in a democratic country.
We saw the same thing in Australia where many Australian states, especially Victoria in the south around the city of Melbourne, adopted Chinese-style lockdowns. All of the people who followed in lockstep with that were people who had socialist orientations, Marxist orientations, or Leftist orientations. In the United States, we saw the blue states engage in much harsher lockdowns than the red states, which still respected the freedom and liberty of their people to make health decisions for themselves and their families.
Down here in Naples, Florida, from where I'm speaking right now, the city did not lock down. The county commissioners voted three to two not to lock down. The mayor came to me and said, "What about masking? Should we mandate masking?" I said, "No. People should be free to decide for themselves whether or not masks work or whether they're useless, whether or not they want to be exposed to a virus and get a cold, or whether they want to wear a mask and shelter in place in their homes." That's the policy they adopted.
But in blue states, run by people with dictatorial tendencies who consciously or subconsciously hungered for total control, you saw exactly the opposite response. You saw overreach again and again and again. We see the same overreach now in the efforts of the World Health Organization to take control of the world by putting in place a pseudo-treaty that would allow it to take over a health response for any epidemic, pandemic, or global threat that it declared. That's the kind of ceding of our sovereignty that I hope we never consent to. Unfortunately, some American politicians, including the people in the White House, seem eager to sign on to this treaty. It should not be allowed to happen.
Mr. Jekielek: We have covered the pandemic treaty and the international health regulations a number of times on this show. I'll direct some of our viewers to the recent interview with Dr. David Bell. I want to go back to fertility. As human beings, we are susceptible to being propagandized to indoctrination, especially when the same things are repeated in all sorts of ways from all sides. We form this perception of consensus, and I'm wondering what your view on this is. Not only are these birth rates low in communist China, but they're low everywhere in the West.
Is this a consequence of accepting Paul Ehrlich's overpopulation view of the world? If we decide to start teaching ourselves that having children is really good and important, can we shift that view? Is there something else in the air that's keeping these birth rates down, not just in totalitarian regimes like China, but in every Western country?
Mr. Mosher: This is a very personal question for me. I was an eyewitness to forced abortions on women in China who were seven months, eight months, nine months pregnant, or who in some cases were in the very process of giving birth, with the infant being killed on the delivery table. Those kinds of atrocities brought home to me the value of human life.
In my own life, when I married and began to have children with my wife, we decided to be generous with having children, and we wound up with nine. I have joked for a long time that for many years the Chinese Communist Party had orders to sterilize me on sight, because I had long since violated the one-child policy.
What I came to see in China with their utter disregard for human life led me to value human life in a way that I hadn't when I was at Stanford University. Paul Ehrlich was a colleague of mine at Stanford University. I was in the anthropology department, and he was in the biology department. His book, The Population Bomb, sold 4 million copies. It convinced millions upon millions of people in the United States, and probably tens of millions of people around the world, that the socially responsible thing to do was not to have children. The exact opposite happens to be the case.
But that propaganda was very effective. A year later, the graduating valedictorian at Yale University gave a speech in which she broke down and cried. She talked about overpopulation and how she and her classmates would never be able to have children. Because if they did, they would be contributing to the problem of overpopulation, and that humanity was breeding itself off the planet.
You could see that she was completely torn up about this. She had been propagandized to the point where her head overruled her heart. I don't know what she went on to do, but she certainly had been propagandized into believing that she could not be selfish and have children.
Of course, we now know that children and people are the ultimate resource. We know that every brain comes with two hands attached. We know that people, given half a chance, will strive to improve their conditions of life and their living standard for themselves and their family.
We know that as humanity's population has increased over the centuries from 100 million to 300 million to 500 million to the present day, that as our numbers have grown, our prosperity has grown even faster, and in fact, much, much faster. As our numbers have grown, we have become better fed, our lifespans have increased, and we're better educated than ever before.
As our numbers start to shrink, we will start losing some of those gains that have been brought about, because you had all of these hundreds of millions of creative intelligences working together to make life better for themselves and their families. We see the decline in birth rates in the West occurring voluntarily, as opposed to a situation like we saw in China with the one-child policy. The government is not an innocent bystander in all of this.
Governments that take a third to half of your income by way of taxes are themselves driving down the fertility rate.
I've long argued that if we want to get the birth rate back up in the United States, France or Great Britain, and Hungary has done a lot on this already, we need to shelter young couples from taxes so that young couples who are willing to marry and have children should be sheltered from all taxes, including Social Security. Perhaps they should be a third sheltered with one child, and two thirds with two children. If they have three children, they should not be paying into Social Security, because they're providing for the future of the elderly in the United States by raising future taxpayers. If you tax them as well, they are in effect being double taxed, as compared to a single person with no children.
If we could simply get the government out of the way in the United States, the birth rate would return to above the replacement rate, which is where we need it to be. Young women in the United States say that they hope to have two-and-a-half children on average. They wind up now with about 1.7 children. Why?
Because life doesn't always work out the way you want it to, because taxes are getting higher, because inflation is eating away at your income, because you have student loan debt to pay back, and because the young man you would have married has become addicted to pornography on the internet or video games. There are all sorts of factors at work here.
We simply need to get the government out of the way and encourage young couples to be generous and have two children to stave off a population disaster. It doesn't take everyone to marry, it only takes about a quarter of the population. If you could simply enable about 25 percent of young people in the United States to act on their fertility desires and have the three children that they would like to have and everyone else can have two or one or none, we would still be fine, demographically speaking. Right now, that's not the case.
Mr. Jekielek: Steven, a final thought as we finish up?
Mr. Mosher: As always, we have to keep in our hearts and minds the suffering of the Chinese people at the hands of the Chinese Communist Party. They are the first and foremost victims of the Chinese Communist Party. We also have to realize that we should never, under any circumstances, however dangerous they may seem, learn any lessons or take any advice from the Chinese Communist Party, which has effectively been in a Cold War with the United States since the founding of the People's Republic of China.
Mr. Jekielek: Steven Mosher, it's such a pleasure to have you on the show.
Mr. Mosher: Thank you, Jan.
Mr. Jekielek: Thank you all for joining Steven Mosher and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I'm your host, Jan Jekielek.
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