China is an international economic powerhouse. Their government very much wants that to grow, hopefully one day surpassing the United States in productivity and innovation. That is their national goal.

But China’s government leaders just received some very bad news on top of already declining news. Their anemically slow population growth has gotten even worse of late. The official Chinese national census shows their annual population growth rate has been an abysmal 0.53% over the past 10 years, down from a rate of 0.57% between 2000 and 2010. Declining population growth is not how superpowers are made.

This, even after the communist government struck down its official one-child policy in 2016 with the drastic hopes of boosting their lagging national fertility. Their encouragement for families to have two children has largely been ignored by couples. From The Daily Citizen.