China is facing a birthrate crisis. Will Xi Jinping start growing baby soldiers in factories?

China reports its current population is 1.42 billion.Yi Fuxian, a University of Wisconsin-Madison academic who studies Chinese demography, believes that number is far too high.

He’s right.Nonetheless, China is at least four times more populous than the United States.

But the great disparity will not last.China is on the brink of a demographic cliff.By the turn of the century, the US might even have more people than China.

Yi believes that country could have as few as 330 million people when the clock strikes 2100.Then, America, according to the US Census Bureau, will have 366 million.China is now heading to history’s greatest drop in population in the absence of war.

“Left unaddressed, China’s demographic trap could precipitate a civilizational collapse,” Yi warns Beijing.The sheer size of China awes foreigners — and instills great pride in its people.“What is the real fulcrum of China’s strength?” asked a popular Chinese website in 2009.

There was a one-word answer: “Population!”And as the anonymous “Fang Feng” posted on the Strong Country Forum of the Communist Party’s People’s Daily when China’s population was still growing, “More people means more power.”Fewer people, then, means less power. China’s leaders have been trying just about everything to stabilize the falling population.The effort dates back to before the country peaked, according to official reporting, in 2021. So far, nothing has worked.

As Wang Feng of the University of California, Irvine points out, “No country has successfully raised fertility with government policies.”As demographics expert Nicholas Eberstadt of the American Enterprise Institute said, “It is possible to use bayonets and police power to force birth rates down against the will of a people; it is very much more difficult to use state force to push birth rates up.”The Chinese government, however, has a solution: growing babies in machines “Matrix”-style, as Zhao DaShuai, a se...