National Security Notebook | Number 6, May 7, 2026

The PRC has a serious population problem.

I’ve been a watcher of Russian demographics—and that country’s long-term population decline—for something like two decades now. It’s a problem that has persisted despite truly Herculean efforts by the Kremlin to reverse it… or at least to ameliorate it.

Vladimir Putin has tried everything from bribing Russians to have more babies (an effort grandly known as the “Maternal Capital Campaign”) to making “childfree propaganda” illegal. Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, on whose Board I sit, has done some great reporting on this. (See here and here.)

None of it has succeeded in making a dent in the Russian Federation’s population decline, though. And over the past half-decade, Putin’s war on Ukraine has made matters much, much worse, as ordinary Russians have fled in droves – to protest the war, to avoid conscription, or for a variety of other reasons.

But Russia isn’t the only American adversary facing such negative population trends. China, the Kremlin’s most important partner in the so-called “axis of upheaval,” is experiencing precisely the same sort of pressures.

Back in January, I wrote a column for Newsweek exploring this impending “population bust.” It’s an intricate problem that has its roots in China’s ruinous “one child” policy, which was instituted in late 1979. The policy was officially repealed back in 2015, but its cumulative effects have been nothing short of seismic. Some scenarios now suggest the PRC’s population could decline by half from its current size of 1.4 billion by the end of the century. That, in turn, has all sorts of implications for China’s economic competitiveness, its plans to take over Taiwan, and the larger strategic competition that Xi Jinping has embarked upon with the United States.

This week, I probed the issue further in the latest installment of GREAT POWER PODCAST, which I host. My guest was Nick Eberstadt of the American Enterprise Institute. Nick’s work on demography is the gold standard, in terms of geopolitical analysis, and has informed a lot of my own work on Russian population. It was a real treat to be able to pick his brain about the true scale of the problem that China is facing, and what it might mean for global security. You can listen to the whole episode here.