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Feb. 21, 2024 - Epoch Times
54:26
[FREE EPISODE] How the CCP ‘Killed Off Its Future’: Steven Mosher
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The real estate sector, the property sector of the Chinese economy is about 60% 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 China's economic and demographic crises, I sit down with China expert Stephen Mosher, president of the Population Research Institute.
How do you create a labor shortage in the most populous country on earth?
Well, killing all 400 million people will pretty much put you in that position.
There's no way out.
Will the Chinese Communist Party start forcing women in China to bear children?
This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Jan Jekyllic.
Stephen Mosher, such a pleasure to have you back on American Thought Leaders.
It's good to be with you today, Jan.
You do important work.
Well, I appreciate that.
And it really has been way too long since we spoke last.
I believe it's actually been four years since you've been on the show.
You were actually one of the earlier guests on the show when American Thought Leaders first began back in 2019.
And one of the things we talked about is your area of expertise, which is some of the demographic realities around China and Chinese Communist Party policy.
So we're going to talk about that today.
But let's talk about how this intersects with the current harsh, harsh realities of the real estate market.
Let's start there.
Well, the Chinese Communist Party's real estate sector is in the process of collapsing right now.
And its collapse, of course, has taken longer than some of us thought.
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, the property sector of the Chinese economy is about 60% 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, Yan, is how this works on the local level.
Because, you know, I was in China back in 1979, 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.
They were dissolved the year after I left.
I've been back many times since, but my affection, my love for the Chinese people, especially for people living in the countryside, has never waned.
I've always been fighting for them, and of course they are the chief victims of the Chinese Communist Party.
Everyone in China, of course, 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.
And here's what happens in the countryside on the property side of the equation.
You will have local officials coming in from the township, or coming in from the county-level government, or even the next level up, which is the prefectural level, and saying, we're going to raise this village to the ground, and we're going to build an apartment complex on the ground where it stood.
Now they will give the local villages 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 object, quite rightly, to having their homes destroyed.
The deal works this way.
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.
And they all meet in a back room somewhere and work out how to split the cash, the results.
And the expectation is these poor villagers who've had their homes destroyed will have no choice but to buy apartments.
To live in, because otherwise they would be homeless.
So, who benefits from this?
Well, 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?
The villagers, who suffer twice.
Not only do they have their homes destroyed, But they then are virtually forced by local officials to buy into this apartment complex and further enrich the communist corrupt officials.
So that's how the property scam works on the local level.
And you can magnify that to the prefectural level, to the provincial level, to the national level.
And you can see how companies like Evergrande got to be the size that they are today.
And you can see how this is kind of a giant Ponzi scheme.
Because once you overbuild to a certain extent, and China has overbuilt now, they've got 70 or 80 million empty apartment buildings, 70 or 80 million empty apartment buildings, a stock that would take a generation to sell down even if they built nothing new.
And too few people to buy those apartment buildings.
And so the economy, this giant Ponzi screen, which is built on this kind of real estate development, is in the middle of collapsing before our very eyes now.
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.
You know, there's another element, the one that we typically hear mostly about, which is the people actually investing in these apartments.
So on one side, there's this, you know, appropriation, the taking of the land, building these high-rises and forcing people to buy in as you're describing it.
That's a lesser-known piece.
The more well-known piece is the investment piece.
So just tell me how that fits into the equation here.
Well, yeah, 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.
But what they do do, because of the lack of investment opportunities in China, because people don't trust the stock market, which they think is, quite rightly, they think is rigged by the government, To produce certain returns and certain results, all of which can disappear overnight if the government regulations change or if the government comes in and expropriates the company.
So the people in the cities really have one investment that they can make with the money that they're trying to save, and that is an investment in an apartment building.
But they're not buying a completed apartment, you see, and here's where the scam is.
They're buying on spec That they will be, next year, the owners of an apartment building that has yet to be built.
And so, they put down a lot of money by way of down payments.
They're paying a construction company to construct, with their investment, an apartment building in real time.
If the apartment building, and this is now happening all over China, in city after city after city, what happens if the apartment building is half constructed?
Maybe the concrete walls and the roof are on, but none of the interior work has been completed because the builder has gone bankrupt, as Evergrande is going bankrupt, now the second largest developer in the country.
What happens then?
All of those thousands...
People who invested their life savings in this apartment, 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 and outside of local banks and outside of local party official offices protesting against what is actually the theft of So that's 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.
You enrich the Chinese Communist Party.
The way you describe this and other aspects of how the CCP treats its people, you use the term wanton destruction of human capital.
That's very interesting and broad to me.
I want to explore that a little bit.
But the common mantra that you hear, and you see this referenced again and again in actually legacy media and so forth, And it's almost like something that people have accepted as a fact, that the Chinese Communist Party has lifted millions upon millions of people out of poverty.
And there is this success, but despite this success, there are these problems.
So how does that square with your description of this wonton destruction of human capital?
Well, I mean, look, the Chinese people have lifted themselves out of poverty.
The Chinese people are the most industrious, intelligent people on the face of the earth.
And given half a chance, they will improve their surroundings.
They will improve their living standards for themselves and their families.
And so, under the reforms that...
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, all of which, of course, the Chinese Communist Party fed off of and took a large part of the wealth generated.
Look, As you probably know, the Chinese Communist Party's operations take about one-sixth of the GDP of the country every year.
That's to pay the salaries of Communist Party officials, that's to provide them with housing, provide them with free meals, provide them with transportation, foreign junkets, exclusive resorts in China, and so forth.
Another one-sixth of the economy is taken, I think, in corruption.
It's easily probably one-sixth, it may be more.
So that together is one-third of the Chinese economy disappearing into the pockets and the overseas bank accounts of the Chinese Communist Party.
But even so, even with those headwinds, even with the corruption, 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.
The most dangerous place to be a billionaire in the world today is to be a billionaire in China.
They've been arrested.
They've been suicided.
They tend to jump off the 14th story of a high-rise apartment building and commit 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.
And 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.
I mean, without...
U.S. financing without access to the U.S. domestic consumer market, the largest market in the world, without U.S. technology stolen in most cases, China would not have been able to develop.
So I attribute the improvement in the living standards of the Chinese people to the hard-working 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 world.
It's true.
You're starting very low following the policies of the Great Leap Forward, for example.
I've heard many different estimates of the death toll of the policies of the Great Leap Forward, but they're in the tens of millions of people, unnatural deaths and cannibalism and all these very extreme situations.
Rising from that is not difficult in a sense, as long as you just change really terrible policy.
Well, when I was living in Chunan Commune in the Pearl River Delta of Guangdong Province, all the way in the south, about 80 miles up the Pearl River from Hong Kong, I speak, read, write Chinese.
I speak, read, write Mandarin and Cantonese.
And I got to know the people in the village, and they told me that their lives were worse Under communist rule than they had been before the revolution.
And 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 labor, manpower that should have been planting and harvesting crops into building dams on the Pearl River, which promptly washed away During the spring rains.
And the 400 people from my village of a couple thousand people were those who had perished in 1960, 1961, early 1962 as a result of this.
The biggest man-made famine in human history.
And the estimate that I use, Jan, is more than tens of millions.
It's about 50 million.
And that estimate comes from Chen Yichir, who was the former head of the Institute for Agrarian Reform in China under the old Communist Party dictator, Chao Zhiyuan, decades ago.
And he surveyed all of the provinces of China and put together an estimate.
50 million people.
That's just part of the death toll caused by the Chinese Communist Party.
But it is a result of Mao's policies, Mao's 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 61.
Lay out for me how the CCP enacts what you describe as this one-ton destruction of human capital, again, in the context of the reality of very significant economic growth since that time.
When I was in China, the one-child policy began.
I think that Hands down, is 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, D.C., I was in a meeting with the former Minister of Health of the People's Republic of China, claiming exactly that number of births had been, what he said, 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.
And that, in fact, is what has happened.
Not only, of course, is it a huge human tragedy, the loss of all those children, the forced abortions and sterilization of all of those women who suffered greatly mentally and physically as a result.
But think about what that means now in terms of these, well, 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.
And you cannot bring them back to life now.
So in 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, the only future that a nation has are its families and its children.
And the Chinese Communist Party, what I call the biggest killing machine in human history by far, has killed off China's economic future by means of the 35 years of the one-child policy now.
Now, they didn't wake up to that fact until 2016.
The policy went into place, effectively, in Guangdong Province in 1980 when I was first there.
It ended in 2016.
Why?
Because the Chinese Communist Party woke up to the fact that it had, at that time, a labor shortage of 4.1 million workers in the country.
Now, how do you create a labor shortage in the most populous country on earth?
Well, killing all 400 million people will pretty much put you in that position.
And 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.
So, it was a year and a half ago they announced now that they were moving to a three-child policy.
Basically saying to the Chinese people, the surviving young men and young women who had survived the one-child policy, basically saying you can now be fruitful and multiply.
And 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 once.
At having children, we should stop at one child.
And now you're telling us that we should have two or three.
We're not interested.
Marriage rates continue to decline.
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.
And 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.
You know, 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 that was going to be the high road to economic development, to China joining the first rank of nations, 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 I think they're beginning to realize that That they have, in effect, strangled the China dream of world domination in the cradle.
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 because of the killing off of half of the last two generations.
Projections now that I've made 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.
Sometimes they kill quickly by execution.
The one-child policy has been a kind of a slow death warrant for the Chinese people.
And 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.
And that's The achievement of the Chinese Communist Party, the killing off of the majority of the Chinese people over time.
Well, you know, there's a whole school of thought in the West, which you actually referenced earlier, that would probably say that that's actually a very good thing, right?
The sort of Malthusian-Arlick view of the world.
I want to talk about that in a moment.
But before we go there, tell me a little bit about these statistics, because as you and I both know, Statistics coming out of the Chinese regime mean very little, although there are some kind of rules to them.
But if you can explain to me how you get your statistics, including that projection that you've made.
Well, here's what the government is saying, and you know, the Chinese Communist Party's statistics are always a massage for propaganda purposes.
So you have to read between the lines, and in fact, sometimes what they claim is exactly the opposite of the truth.
But what they predicted in 2016, when they ended the one-child policy, they predicted that the 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 replacement.
Replacement rate fertility is 2.1 children.
With 2.1 children, you have zero population growth over time.
The population basically stabilizes, doesn't grow, doesn't shrink.
So 1.8 would still be below replacement rate fertility, but it would be much better But China's birth rate did not recover.
It continued to fall.
And the number of births that the government reports in 2022, and this comes again from the Chinese Communist Party State Statistical Bureau, is 9.56 million children born.
So the National Bureau of Statistics, State Statistical Bureau, you can also translate it as, has now admitted that China has one of the lowest birth rates in the world.
And the official figure is 1.09 children per woman.
So let's just say about one child per woman over her reproductive lifetime.
Now, I believe that the fact they would admit that number, Jan, means that the real number is probably lower, okay?
Because I think the real number is probably lower than one, and I say that because if you look at Hong Kong, If you look at Hong Kong, the birth rate now in Hong Kong is.8 child per woman.
That's less than one child per woman over a reproductive lifetime.
And I think that that's where China's population is headed.
The other thing I would say about China's population is I think that the population of China is smaller than the 1.4 billion claimed.
And 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.
Hospitals get subsidies based on how many patients they have, and so on and so forth throughout the entire government.
So everyone has an incentive to exaggerate the numbers a little bit, to increase the number of state subsidies.
And 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.
So I think the population of China is somewhat below 1.4 billion even now.
And clearly there's been a systematic exaggeration of the number of births in China over the last few decades.
You know, for the first time since Mao Zedong's great famine in 1961 that we talked about, right, 50 million people dying, China's population is actually falling, is decreasing from year to year.
China's filling fewer cradles than coffins today.
And that's a sad, sad fact.
So what that means is the demographic dividend that you got from having Very few children and young people staying in the workforce, especially young women, contributed to China's rapid economic growth.
It contributed to the military buildup.
It contributed to its strategic expansion.
That demographic dividend is gone.
Instead, as the number of working-age people declines, we'll see labor costs go up, and China hasn't transitioned yet to a rich country.
It is still a middle-income country.
Now, you can say, well, Japan got old, and South Korea got old, Taiwan got old.
A lot of countries on 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.
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.
And this is a baby bust I think 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, you know, 400 million missing people.
They can't make up for 100 million empty cradles.
That resource, the ultimate resource, the human being, Cannot be replaced.
It is irreplaceable.
You know, and that's true, but I can't help but think that, you know, again, in line with your description of this one approach of wanton destruction of human capital, I mean, essentially, according to the Chinese Communist Party, human beings can be kind of used as well as fodder for development or basically whatever, whatever the purposes the CCP may deem necessary.
And that's sort of what you're describing as a very kind of scary situation, because I wonder what sorts of extreme methods they might cook up with to try to deal with this intractable problem.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, you're absolutely right.
I mean, the Chinese Communist Party has always treated the Chinese masses—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.
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.
Well, it does matter over time.
And I'm sure that, you know, as we said, neither Deng Xiaoping nor Xi Jinping ever imagined a one-child policy would result in the death of the China dream.
But it has.
Now, let's talk a little bit more about the numbers, and then let's talk about what the Chinese Communist Party might do in extremis, when it really gets pushed into a corner by the demographic trap that it's set for itself.
If you crunch the numbers, as I have, if 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 population of the U.S.,
If the unwillingness of young Chinese women to get married and have children at all, which we see in real-time happening, and the birthrate falls to, say, 0.8, which is where it is in Hong Kong, then there'll 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?
Well, it's already tried to start increasing the birth rate.
Just a couple of weeks ago, the chairman of the Central Military Commission, who happens to be named Xi Jinping, he's the chairman of everything in China.
The chairman of the Central Military Commission said that the members of the People's Liberation Army are now being encouraged to have three children.
Now, they use the word encourage, right?
Guli.
But, of course, what that means in practice is an order.
When your commander-in-chief says, be fruitful and multiply, have children, then your promotions are going to be pegged to whether or not you obey God.
So, the group that is most immediately under his control, he's already ordered to have three children to stay off the demographic collapse.
Several years ago, in fact, the Communist Party itself had announced that young Communist Party members should marry and have at least two children.
I think that has now been increased to three.
So 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.
in encouraging young men to donate their sperm.
They haven't yet set up banks for eggs yet.
Maybe that's coming, where young women will 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.
I think that young women will not be told to donate their eggs.
They'll be told to donate their uteruses and themselves.
They will be told that for the good of the country, for the good of China's prosperity, for the good of the future of China, they must consent to have children.
And there will be quotas announced, and there will be penalties for not obeying.
Now, 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 they must get an abortion.
They told young women who got pregnant before they were married they must get an abortion.
They told young women who were married but conceived a child outside of the quota system without permission of the government that they must get an abortion.
And they told young women who'd had one child that they now must be sterilized.
So China has controlled in a top-down fashion the fertility of the country for decades to drive down the fertility.
What would stand in the way of the Chinese Communist Party from doing the opposite of using young women as a captive reproductive force to repopulate the country now that they've effectively centered in a downward spiral demographically?
I can't see any moral reasons, any ethical reasons why the Communist Party would hesitate for a minute to do that.
I mean, Chairman Mao himself in 1958 said, we planned the production of steel, we planned 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 we control production.
Now that little snippet of his speech was edited out of his collective works, but we now know it existed.
So his idea, Mao's idea back in the 1950s, Was that you control reproduction the same way you control production.
And if you need fewer babies, you abort.
If you need more babies, I think you forcibly impregnate.
So before the end of the day, before the end of the century, maybe before the end of this decade, I think we will see forced pregnancy in one form or another in China today.
It's a logical outcome of the situation that they're in.
This just speaks to this hubris of total control, imagining you can control human beings in such draconian ways.
It never ceases to astonish me, but absolutely it's a logical corollary to everything that's been done up to now.
One thing I want to comment on very briefly, I'm thinking about this recent piece that Ashley Rinsberg has written, I believe in Tablet magazine, about the credulity of Western journalists and scientific minds to statistics coming out of China.
Specifically, I'm thinking about the COVID death toll, which stuck at 5,000 people from a very, very early time.
And, of course, which helped, in a way, endorse some of these horrific zero-COVID policies, lockdown policies, which have had such a terrible toll on society.
Absolutely.
The Chinese Communist Party lies with statistics, and with the outbreak of COVID-19 in Wuhan, I believe as far back in September We're good to go.
On or around January 1st of 2020, they told visiting Tedros Cabrisis, the head of the World Health Organization, that it was under control, that they only had a few cases, and that they were effectively treating them by putting those people who were ill with COVID on respirators.
And...
And using remdesivir and some other drugs which have proved not to be as effective as originally claimed.
But they claimed a 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, Italy and Rome, Italy and Madrid, Spain and San Francisco and Los Angeles, effectively spreading a highly infectious respiratory virus around the world.
But because they claimed their own death rate was so low because of their effective quarantines, zero COVID policy, locking people in their apartments, the rest of the world, led by Dr.
Anthony Fauci, I 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, Yan, called The Politically Incorrect Guide to Pandemics, in which I showed that Fauci and other people, CDC and the FDA and other agencies, were Mimicking, we're modeling their response to the coronavirus epidemic on China's supposedly successful strategy.
And of course, it wasn't successful at all.
We know, I mean, we knew in real time in March and April of 2020 that the smokestacks of the crematoria in Wuhan, I believe there were 14 crematoria in and around the city of Wuhan, the epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic, We're going day and night.
The ovens were going day and night to cremate the bodies of those who had died from coronavirus.
And the official death toll of a few hundred then becoming a few thousand is nonsense.
There were tens of thousands.
I think in April I wrote a piece saying at least 50,000 or 60,000 people have died in Wuhan alone, and of course it was spreading beyond Wuhan to the province of Hubei.
And beyond that, other cities in China in real time, even at that time.
So the numbers were clearly fabricated.
But the incredible naivete, I guess that's the most charitable interpretation of what happened.
The incredible naivete of some of our scientists in looking to China for a solution to contain what is basically an uncontainable, highly transmissible airborne respiratory virus.
The naivete 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.
And that's the conclusion that I was forced to reach.
And I think 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 as a model for anything.
Least of all as a model in treating how to treat an infectious disease.
I'll just mention, from all these measures, like for example, the realities around the crematoria, there were all sorts of other measures that we looked at, including some internal statistics that the party had explored.
The death toll was much, much greater early on.
So there's that whole reality.
Some people in the health freedom movement, so to speak, believe that it was purely propaganda coming out of China deliberately that convinced the West to follow these draconian policies.
But I think it's more exactly what you said, right?
There's this kind of The admiration that some of the leaders in the West have for the ability to control, and an inability to see the incredible failures that have come out of that ability to control in a totalitarian structure, as is Communist China.
And that seems to me to be the real lesson and to just understand that there's this mentality that human beings aren't really considered human.
So what do you expect would be the result in a situation where that is the mentality?
I just don't think that's grasped sufficiently in the West yet.
No, I don't think it is by the majority of people.
I think, however, that the globalists, the elitists, have understood the lesson quite well.
They see in China's COVID-0 policies the 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 in Shanghai when they locked down 20 some million people in Shanghai, In their apartments, is really an expression of the kind of total control that the Chinese Communist Party has been striving for since really its very founding back in 1921.
And I think it found its fullest expression in the zero COVID policies, which I have written about as not just an expression of totalitarianism perfected, But also as preparation for war,
because I think in a wartime scenario, you'd like the ability to lock everyone on their job sites to keep them producing weapons or vital foodstuffs, or lock everyone in their apartments to prevent them from engaging in popular demonstrations, riots, or unrest.
And it is interesting that the man in charge of Shanghai, as a result of the zero COVID policies, which killed a lot more people than the coronavirus, the weaker variant of the coronavirus, did in Shanghai at that time last year.
that 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.
Now, overseas, what you saw was every would-be dictator in the world, every leftist, every Marxist, every communist, 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, for example, New Zealand, where the former Prime Minister Jacinta Ardern locked down the entire country And forbade people from going out of their homes for months on end, forbade people from going to funerals for loved ones who had died, were encouraging neighbors to report on each other if they saw anyone leaving the perimeter of their house and their yard.
The 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.
And all of the people who followed in lockstep with that were people who had socialist orientations, Marxist orientations, leftist orientations.
We saw on 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, where I'm speaking to you from, the city did not lock down.
The county commissioners voted 3-2 not to lock down.
The mayor came to me and said, what about masking?
Should we mandate masking?
And I said, no.
I said, 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.
And that's the policy they adopted.
But in blue states, run by people with dictatorial tendencies, who hungered, I think, consciously or subconsciously for total control, you saw exactly the opposite response.
You saw overreach again and again and again.
And 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, global threat that it declared on the horizon.
That's a kind of ceding of our sovereignty that I hope we never consent to.
But that unfortunately some American politicians, including the people in the White House, seem eager to sign on to.
It should not be allowed to happen.
Of course, we've 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.
One of the things, speaking of the pandemic, that I realized as a consequence of my own education of seeing what happened in our society is that As human beings, we are actually incredibly susceptible to being propagandized to indoctrination, especially when the same things are repeated in all sorts of ways, and they seem to come from all sides, and there's this perception of consensus that we have.
It's astonishing.
I'm wondering to myself what your view on this is.
Not only are these birth rates low in communist China, but they're low, frankly, everywhere in the West.
I'm wondering If this is a consequence of just accepting this Paul Ehrlich's view of the world, and if we decide to start teaching ourselves that having children is actually a really good thing for society and important, that we can shift that.
Or is there something else in the air that's keeping these birth rates down, not just in totalitarian We're good to go.
Well, this is a very personal question for me because as someone who was an eyewitness to forced abortions in China, forced abortions of women who, by the way, were seven months, eight months, nine months pregnant, 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.
And so in my own life, when I married and began to have children with my wife, we decided to be generous in having children.
And so we wound up with nine, which I have joked for a long time that for many years the Chinese Communist Party has had orders to sterilize me on site because I had long since violated the one-child policy.
But I came to see in China the utter disregard for human life led me to value human life in a way that I hadn't when I was at Stanford University.
You know, Paul Ehrlich was a colleague of mine at Stanford University.
I was in the anthropology department.
He was in the biology department.
His book, The Population Bomb, sold four million copies, and it convinced...
I think 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.
And exactly the opposite is the case.
But that propaganda was very effective because a year later...
The graduating valedictorian at Yale University gave a speech in which she broke down crying in her speech because she talked about overpopulation and she talked about how she and her classmates would never be able to have children because if they did they'd 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 but she had been propagandized to the point where her Head overruled her heart, and 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.
Now, 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, 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.
In fact, much, much faster.
So, as our numbers have grown, we have become better fed.
Our lifespans have increased.
We're better educated than ever before.
And I'm afraid that as our numbers start to shrink, we will start losing some of those gains that have been brought about because you have 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.
But the government is not an innocent bystander in all of this.
Governments that take a third to a half of your income by way of taxes are themselves driving down the fertility rate.
So I've long argued that Jan, that what we need to do, if we want to get the birth rate back up in the United States, if France or Hungary, which has done a lot already, or Great Britain wants to get its birth rate up, 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 a third sheltered with one child, two-thirds with two, and 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, and if you tax them at the same time, they're in effect being double-taxed as compared to a single person with no children.
So, I mean, if we can simply get the government out of the way in the United States, the birth rate would return, I think, to above replacement, 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.
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.
Because the young man you would have married has become addicted to pornography on the internet or video games.
And there are all sorts of factors at work here.
But if we can simply get the government out of the way...
And encourage young couples to be generous.
It doesn't take everyone to marry and have two children to stave off population disaster.
It takes about a quarter of the population.
If you could simply enable about 25% of young people in the United States to act on their fertility desires and have the three children that they would like to have, then everyone else can have two or one or none, and we would still be fine, demographically speaking.
Right now, that's not the case.
Absolutely fascinating, Steve.
Well, a quick final thought as we finish?
Well, I think, 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, who 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, take any advice from the Chinese Communist Party, which has effectively been in a cold war with the United States from the founding of the People's Republic of China. which has effectively been in a cold war with the Well, Steve Moser, it's such a pleasure to have had you on.
Thank you.
Thank you, Jan.
Thank you all for joining Steve Mosher and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders.
I'm your host, Jan Jekielek.
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