Remember China's one-child policy that ran from about 1980-2015?

Well, it looks like, for lack of a better term, it worked.

Yup, the population in China, for the first time since 1961, is in decline.

The Asian country ended last year with 850,000 fewer people than the previous year's end, according to the National Bureau of Statistics…

China saw approximately 9.56 million births in 2022, with approximately 10.41 million deaths.

The statistics only cover mainland China and leave out island territories such as Hong Kong and the like.

What's more, due to the one-child policy that expired just seven years ago, the number of males in China outnumber females 722.06 million to 689.69 million.

These are the unintended consequences of the policy, which saw many Chinese essentially just "throw out" their female infants in favor of hopefully having a male the next time around.

Until 2016, the Chinese Communist Party enforced a one-child policy meant to limit the once-booming population. This previous restriction on couples' number of offspring – combined with a cultural preference for male children – has led to a noticeable gap between the genders.

There are other factors to this population decline, such as the cost of childcare in large cities, but I can't help but think that this unnatural gender imbalance has a lot more to do with it than we can imagine.

If you want to learn more about the one-child policy, give this wonderful documentary a try. It's well worth the watch.

I'd like to say this should serve as a warning to policymakers worldwide. However, from the depopulation garbage I hear coming out of the World Economic Forum, maybe this will be something they try on a global scale.

Hope not.