ANOTHER KIND OF AMBER ALERT

I've been hearing whisperings of this for about a decade. The first time I came across it in a form for public consumption was in a discussion on the Making Sense podcast with guest Peter Zeihan. Since then, more "dissidents" and "controversial" voices have been coming out of the woodwork, or been highlighted, spelling out the math in different places. Whether you take it as sensible demographics or outlandish conspiracy theory, a narrative growing in popularity says there are somewhere between 300 million and a billion "missing" people in China.

What seems irrefutable is that in 1950, China's population was estimated to be approximately 544 million people. By 1982 there were said to be around one billion people in China and 1.4 billion by 2025. What is also pretty reliable is that, as a direct result of Communist takeover in 1950 and policies related to the Great Leap Forward, from 1959 to 1961 China experienced one of the worst man-made disasters ever recorded, the Great Famine, with starvation estimates ranging between 25 and 55 million. We also know the country immediately followed this up with the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, 1966-'76, resulting in excess death estimates in the millions.

But instead of declining over this period, we're told the population jumped up and up again and, moreover, fearing overpopulation, by 1973 the government was discouraging people from having kids. Then in 1980 the nation formally implement the famous One Child Policy, with a limited exceptions for small minority populations or in the case of rural farming communities where the first born was a girl. The policy stayed in place until 2016, when two kids per couple (or just replacement rates) became permissible.

Though demographics are complicated, with loads of variables and dynamics at play, some suggest that if there were no world-historic mass casualty events and no world-historic reproduction policy, every woman in China needed to have three children to take China's population of 545 million to reach 1.4 billion in 70 years. Is it that the reproduction rates were so high prior to 1980, maybe five to seven kids per family, and the situation improved so rapidly that the organized halt of reproduction down to one later in the century resulted in an average of closer to three over this whole time period, making the math more or less work? Perhaps.

Regardless, others suggest the population has been grossly overestimated due to other economic measures. We're told that post-famine/revolution policies such as per capita resource distribution resulted in the common habit of communities misrepresenting their populations. And this error in the accounting amplified over across the country and over time has meant that there is effectively an entire age cohort missing. As Zeihan tells it, "The Chinese basically haven't repopulated anyone under age 40. The bottom line is they probably now have more people over age 54 than under and there isn't an economic model that will work with that by the year 2035." With approximately 300 million fewer people than they need, Zeihan predicts total population collapse in China within many of our lifetimes, regardless of how many kids people under 50 do or do not have. In a conversation from November of 2025, he explains how even a UAE-style slave labour population couldn't keep the country afloat. "China is already implementing quasi-slavery to help feed their solar industry, but this barely dents the demographic problem." Zeihan explains, "The scale needed to flip the demographic script just isn’t feasible; we’re talking about importing at least 100 million workers. Any idea where that would come from?"

I do have an idea, actually. Whatever you think the demographics numbers look like, one thing seems pretty clear: robots, and a whole lot of them, are in our future — and not to boost economic growth or sustain manufacturing output but just to keep the lights on and prevent total system collapse.