Chinese Decadence Worsens

We hear a lot about the supposed greatness of China under the Chinese Communist Party. And not just from its paid propagandists. Gullible westerners contribute as well. During Covid, for example, American left-wing media praised the CCP’s handling of the pandemic, especially in contrast with how the U.S. managed the disease. Similarly, Sohrab Ahmari has more generally contrasted China with what he views are America’s failings. Ahmari once tweeted that he is “at peace with a Chinese-led 21st century.”

Whereas “late-liberal America is too dumb and decadent to last as a superpower,” Ahmari continued, Chinese civilization “will possess a great deal of natural virtue,” particularly “if it recovers more of its Confucian roots.” Ahmari also once claimed to be struck by “the degree to which mainland Chinese culture fostered under the rule of the Dread CCP — you know, sort of as American conservatives see it — is profoundly conservative, profoundly traditional, compared to anything we would encounter in the ‘conservative’ United States.”

Praise of China’s handling of Covid tended to downplay its totalitarian methods (and the actual results thereof). Likewise, praise of China’s resistance to decadence has tended to ignore evidence of, well . . . China’s decadence, as well as evidence of how the government has contributed to or failed to arrest it. In September, Nicholas Pompella wrote for National Review a decisive rebuttal to the notion that the CCP was uniquely resisting cultural rot. Recounting, among other things, high rates of divorce and declining rates of marriage, the anomie of China’s youth, the lingering consequences of the CCP’s one-child policy, and a culture of listless compliance that is one of the main things holding society together despite its having “an abyss at its center,” Pompella concluded that “China has its own culture crisis of decadence and nihilism, and it’s worse than ours.”

There is yet more evidence of Chinese decadence: Its much-vaunted extended kinship networks have begun to die out. Writing with Ashton Verdery, American Enterprise Institute demographer Nicholas Eberstadt has the details. The year 2023 began in China with a government acknowledgement that the previous year had seen more deaths than births, “marking the first year of decline in population since the catastrophic famine of the early 1960s caused by Mao’s Great Leap Forward.” And things didn’t get better: 2023 also brought news that 2022 saw the lowest number of marriages in the country since 1986, when “some 53 million fewer people age 20–39” lived there.

These data affirm larger trends of population and marital decline. As a result, the dense network of immediate and extended families that has helped China through the past several decades is beginning to thin. And this is right when China’s population has begun to age rapidly — that is, when members of those very networks would be expected to care for their aging relatives. “The massive number of older adults in China sits atop a steep hill, at just the moment when the bushes of kinship are wilting and the branches constituting the family care dam are snapping. (Mixed metaphors, but you get the point.)” It’s a crisis China will be dealing with over the next 30 years — and beyond.

America has plenty of problems, including versions of some those that China faces, as well as entirely unique ones. But we will solve them, preserving and — as necessary — restoring our greatness by hewing to what is best about our national character. Not by fawning over a totalitarian society that is succumbing to a decadence all its own.