Chinas economy may never overtake America and its all due to an ill-fated 47-year-old policy

Just one child doomed China’s hopes of overtaking the US.The Middle Kingdom, once a surging economic growth engine expected to eclipse the US economy in just a few years, is not expected to outgrow the US until the 2040s now — if it does at all.And it’s largely down to China’s 1979 One Child Policy, which is devastating growth, according to Yi Fuxian, a Chinese demographer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.Plummeting birth rates and economic problems have erased the 6+% per year growth that China reported before the COVID-19 pandemic.Many economists in both China and the West were taken in by the Chinese Communist Party’s inflated official figures, which massively overestimated the country’s consumer power, Fuxian said.It comes as a Goldman Sachs study found that China’s population began shrinking in 2022, just 13 years after that of neighboring Japan.And its decline is on track to be far steeper, dramatically damaging the country’s economic prospects, the Financial Times reported.China has a GDP of $21.6 trillion — just two-thirds the size of the US economy.

Yi told The Post that official Chinese statistics have systematically inflated the country’s birthrates and total population figures going back decades.While official reports claim China has a population of over 1.4 billion, Yi calculates that the true figure in 2020 was “under 1.28 billion,” at least 130 million lower than reported.India actually surpassed China as the world’s most populous nation years earlier than officially recognized, according to Yi, author of the 2007 book, “Big Country with an Empty Nest,” which criticized China’s one-child policies.The US, the third most populous country in the world, has 342 million people — about a quarter the population of China.Yi argues that China’s population actually began shrinking in 2018, four years earlier than Goldman Sachs’ estimate, and more than a decade before the official projection of 2031 to 2034.Most of th...