Le Journal

BEIJING (AP) — From ancient times until today, an enormous population has been a foundational way for China to project its strength. But anxiety about managing so many mouths has always loomed. “China has a population of 600 million people, and we must never forget this fact,” Mao Zedong said in 1957, shortly before setting off a calamitous famine. China’s masses, though, are getting to be less massive. And that’s a problem. Birth rate numbers released Monday, the lowest since Mao’s Communists established the People’s Republic in 1949, are the latest development in a millennia-long struggle in China, where producing children and refreshing the population of the young have been central to the national conversation since the country’s earliest days. China’s population stands at 1.404 billion today, down 3 million from the previous year. And the central government’s challenge remains much as it has always been: to manage a citizenry that both enhances the country’s strength and claims enormous resources. But various factors — policy, generational change and general evolution of the way people live — have officials concerned that there won’t be enough young Chinese people to build the tomorrow they want. This week’s numbers illustrate how complicated the problem remains. The ripples of the one-child policy It’s likely that urban Chinese of the 1980s could barely imagine the situation today — a society where the government is pushing families to have more — up to three — children. The one-child policy, officially instituted in 1980 four years after Mao’s death, was designed to curb a growing population. It restricted Chinese couples to a single offspring and eventually, in many cases, punished them if they didn’t comply. The rationale: At that time, under Deng Xiaoping’s policy of “reform and opening-up,” the country’s capital and resources couldn’t keep up with the population’s demands. Beijing’s answer was to slow the population’s growth. Over time, that created a disproportionate amount of elderly people. “China’s demographic transition, characterized by people getting old before becoming rich, creates challenges and opportunities,” the state-controlled newspaper China Daily said in 2024. In the years after implementation, the one-child policy produced unintended consequences: —A desire for sons gave rise to the hiding, mistreatment and sometimes outright killing of baby girls, especially in rural areas. —Among better-off families in cities — where the policy was primarily aimed — it also gave rise to millions of households in which an only child became the focus of attention, creating a generation of what some call “little emperors.” —Coupled with recent loosening of the “hukou,” or household registration, system that limits where Chinese people can live within their country, many only children wound up living far from their parents, promoting social ills like loneliness and alienation. —Population growth slowed to a crawl, leading in recent years to numbers like Monday’s. “China’s one-child policy will be remembered as one of the costliest lessons of misguided public policymaking,” the Brookings Institution said in a 2016 report shortly after the policy was abolished. It also blamed “a social discourse that has erroneously blamed population growth for virtually all the country’s social and economic problems.” Trying to turn the tide One of China’s most ancient precepts is that there are three ways to disrespect your parents and ancestors — and not having offspring is one of them. In that respect, limiting population growth ran counter to long-established cultural norms and traditions. As the one-child policy ebbed, Chinese President Xi Jinping rejuvenated that age-old notion. He started to publicly liken the population to Chinese power once again — or, as he put it, a “great wall of steel forged by over 1.4 billion Chinese people.” It doesn’t help that India surpassed China in population in 2023. The on-again, off-again rival…

RAQQA, Syria (AP) — The Syrian military claimed Tuesday that guards from the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces had abandoned a camp in northeast Syria housing thousands of people linked to the Islamic State group, allowing the detainees to escape. The al-Hol camp houses mainly women and children who are family members of IS members or accused of being otherwise affiliated with the group. Thousands of accused IS militants are separately housed in prisons in northeast Syria. The SDF subsequently confirmed that its guards had withdrawn from the camp, blaming “international indifference toward the issue of the ISIS terrorist organization and the failure of the international community to assume its responsibilities in addressing this serious matter,” using another abbreviation for IS. It said its forces had redeployed “in the vicinity of cities in northern Syria that are facing increasing risks and threats” from government forces. Representatives of the U.S. military did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Earlier Tuesday, Syria’s ministry of interior said Tuesday that 120 Islamic State members escaped from a prison in northeast Syria a day earlier, amid clashes between government forces and the SDF, which guards the prison. Security forces recaptured 81 of the escapees, “while intensive security efforts continue to pursue the remaining fugitives and take the necessary legal measures against them,” the statement said. The SDF and the government have traded blame over the escape from a prison in the town of Shaddadeh, amid the breakdown of a ceasefire deal between the two sides. Also Tuesday, the SDF accused “Damascus-affiliated factions” of cutting off water supplies to the al-Aqtan prison near the city of Raqqa, which it called a “blatant violation of humanitarian standards.” The SDF, the main U.S.-backed force that fought IS in Syria, controls more than a dozen prisons in the northeast where some 9,000 IS members have been held for years without trial. Many of the detained extremists are believed to have carried out atrocities in Syria and Iraq after IS declared a caliphate in June 2014 over large parts of Syria and Iraq. IS was defeated in Iraq in 2017 and in Syria two years later, but the group’s sleeper cells still carry out deadly attacks in both countries. Under a deal announced Sunday, government forces were to take over control of the prisons from the SDF, but the transfer did not go smoothly. On Monday, Syrian government forces and SDF fighters clashed around two prisons housing members of the Islamic State group in Syria’s northeast. The clashes came as SDF chief commander Mazloum Abdi was said to be in Damascus to attempt to solidify a ceasefire deal reached Sunday that ended days of deadly fighting during which government forces captured wide areas of northeast Syria from the SDF. Abdi issued no statement after the meeting and the SDF later issued a statement calling for “all of our youth” to “join the ranks of the resistance,” appearing to signal that the deal had fallen apart. Interim President Ahmad al-Sharaa postponed a planned trip to Germany Tuesday amid the ongoing tensions in northeast Syria. Since toppling Bashar Assad in December 2024, Syria’s new leaders have struggled to assert their full authority over the war-torn country. An agreement was reached in March that would merge the SDF with Damascus, but it didn’t gain traction. Earlier this month, clashes broke out in the city of Aleppo, followed by the government offensive that seized control of Deir el-Zour and Raqqa provinces, critical areas under the SDF that include oil and gas fields, river dams along the Euphrates and border crossings. ——— Sewell reported from Beirut. Source