The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - Saving China: Three-Child Policy || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: January 2, 2026

If China was able to curb population growth with the One-Child Policy, can a Three-Child Policy help solve the current Chinese demographic crisis?Join the Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/PeterZeihanFull Newsletter: https://bit.ly/49BPg3V

Hey all, Peter Zine, here coming to you from Colorado. Today, we're taking a question from the Patreon page, specifically. How about solutions to China's demographic problems? What if they started to institute a mandatory three-child policy? Short version is clever, but no. Number one, roughly half of the Chinese population now lives in high-rise condos. There isn't room for one kid, much less three. So you've got a mechanical problem there.

And if you wanted to force everyone to have three kids, you'd have to first change the residency style of the country and basically force people out of the major cities where the economic activity is and where the services are and where the government has control of things and push them back to the outskirts or into the areas beyond. So you might, might, might, might, might, might, if you're really brutal about it, get the birth rate up.

But it would come at the cost of the entirety of the Chinese economic model complete with the way that the Chinese Communist Party controls the population. So no. Second, I don't even think it's physically possible anymore. to move the numbers to the degree that are necessary. According to official Chinese statistics, which are definitely not correct, the average age in China is now 44-45,

and getting people over age 45 to kick out three kids, I'm sorry, that's just not biologically possible any longer, and that assumes the Chinese data is right, which it, of course, is not. The debate within Chinese statistical circles, because that is a thing, is how much they have over-the-countered their population, by, whether it's just 100 million or something closer to 300 million, but there's a broad

agreement that most of the overcount are in people under age 40. And if you look at what has happened with the official data, they're now saying they have roughly 60% as many people age 6 to 0 as they have aged 11 to 6. So we've got a sharp collapse coming down the pipe, even according to the official numbers. If that thins out in the teenagers and the 20-somethings, then you're actually looking at the average age and child. kind of being a lot higher than 44, probably closer to 54 or even higher. And in that sort of environment, having three kids for the small number of people that they have of childbearing age just isn't going to move the needle at all.

Right now, the only theory I've even heard that might work that would allow the CCP to maintain their political and economic system is Star Wars-style cloning. And for those of you who are not Star Wars nuts, that's basically taking an embryo, it into a 20-year-old and under three years, and the 20-year-old that you've created actually has the full skill set and become a fully functional adult. Obviously, our technology is not there at this point. It certainly isn't in China. But growing an entire new generation of 20-somethings is the only way to make this work.

And if you want to do it the old-fashioned way, that takes at least 20 years, and the Chinese no longer have enough people to even attempt, regardless of what the government tries to force upon its population.