China’s One-Child Policy Was Demographic Suicide: Testimony

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A Chinese YouTuber’s personal testimony exposes how Deng Xiaoping’s most infamous policy hollowed out China’s future from within.

By TRH World Desk

New Delhi, January 27, 2026 — The most damning critiques of the Chinese Communist Party no longer come from foreign analysts or rival governments. They come from Chinese voices themselves—raw, personal, and impossible to dismiss. Ken Cao, a Chinese YouTuber born in the 1980s, belongs to what may be history’s largest government-mandated social experiment: an entire generation of only children.

His verdict is blunt. The One-Child Policy was not a policy failure. It was demographic suicide.

Introduced in 1979 under Deng Xiaoping, the policy is often defended as a harsh but necessary step toward economic modernisation. That defence collapses when confronted with what it actually entailed: forced sterilisation, coerced abortions, and state violence against women’s bodies. In places like Shandong province in 1991, the campaign chillingly known as “100 days without babies” turned population control into open terror. Quotas mattered more than human life.

The irony is cruel. China’s birth rate was already falling naturally due to urbanisation and rising female workforce participation. The Party chose coercion anyway—because authoritarian systems distrust organic change and prefer command over consent. Like most shortcuts taken by dictatorships, the consequences were delayed but explosive.

Today, those consequences define China’s crisis. The population is shrinking. The workforce is ageing rapidly. By 2030, one in four Chinese will be over 60. Pension systems are under strain, productivity is slowing, and a severe gender imbalance has left millions of men without prospects of marriage or family. No policy directive can reverse this. Babies are not industrial products.

Beijing’s U-turn—from one child to three, from fines to subsidies—has failed because fear lasts longer than slogans. You cannot erase four decades of trauma with cash handouts and patriotic posters urging citizens to “give birth for the country.”

Ken Cao’s story captures the human cost: a single child burdened with the weight of an entire family tree. Multiply that pressure by hundreds of millions, and the scale of the tragedy becomes clear.

Deng Xiaoping wanted China to be rich and powerful. He forgot a fundamental truth: a nation’s ultimate resource is its people. Without them, skyscrapers, bullet trains, and military parades are monuments to emptiness.

China’s demographic collapse is not an accident of history. It is self-inflicted—and irreversible.