Peter Zeihan

You get your driver's license.

There's thousands throughout your lifetimes.

The first three in China, not birth, because until recently, not all Chinese were born in hospitals.

The first one was when you get a single battery of immunizations at some point around six months old.

What they discovered was that the doctor who was giving the shots got paid per shot.

So the doctors lied about the number of shots that they got.

The second point is when you enroll in kindergarten.

Local governments get subsidies from the federal system based on how many students matriculate.

So the local governments lied about that.

The third point is when you pay national taxes for the first time, which is typically 17, 18, 19, unless you switch to tertiary education, then it's 21, 22, 23.

So you get to calendar year 2024.

And the Chinese realize that the children that they thought started to be born in the late 1990s were never born at all.

And so the question they have, and there's no way to get the data, is did we overcount our population by 100 million people?

Or did we overcount by 300 million people or more?

So even according to the official statistics, China is no longer the most populous country.

That's India.

It has been for a while.

Probably has been since about 2006.

The Chinese are now publicly admitting that their birth rate has been lower than the United States' since 1991.

And it looks like it might be significantly worse than that.