It's Wednesday, January 21, 2026. I'm Albert Mowler, and this is the Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview. Sometimes statistics basically present numbers. Sometimes those numbers are important, sometimes not. But sometimes you see in statistics or in even government reports something that amounts to a worldview crisis, perhaps even a worldview catastrophe. That's what has taken place just over the course of the last couple of days, with reports coming out from China. So we're talking about official reports coming out with the authorization of the government headed, of course, by the Communist Party there in China. And that government has released information indicating that the birth rate in China for the last completed year is the lowest of the entire period of the dominance of the Chinese Communist Party there. So in the entire history of the Communist Party there in China, we're looking at the lowest birth rate ever. And as you look at this, you recognize that when you see China, you have generally thought over the course of the last several decades of the world's most populous country. It isn't now. It fell to second place behind India in the year 2023. But what we're looking at in China right now is what can only be described as a demographic catastrophe. It's interesting to see that the mainstream media in the United States know this is a big story. Now, more on that in just a moment, but they do know this is a big story. The headline in the New York Times, China pushes for families as births hit historic low. The headline in the Wall Street Journal, China's birth rate sinks to record low. The reported NPR, National Public Radio, quote, China's birth rate fell to a record low last year despite attempts to boost it. Now those headlines are actually pretty accurate because we are looking at two things. The Chinese Communist Party has attempted to encourage its citizens to have more babies. That project has been an enormous failure. As a matter of fact, by the time you come to the end of this international analysis, we're going to see that there isn't a nation on earth that has figured out how to raise the birth rate once it has reached such perilous lows. That includes the United States. Right now, our birth rate is basically hovering near the replacement rate. The problem is that our birth rate is only holding steady in any sense because immigrants tend to have more children. If there is a radical reduction in immigration in the United States, you're going to see the same kind of pattern take place. But it will not take place as quickly. More on that another day. Right now, we're looking at China. And of course, when we're looking at China, we're looking at a history, a history that invokes massive worldview considerations. All right, let's just consider that China has, in terms of the modern age, modern centuries has always had a very large population. It has, in the 20th century, been one of the places of great unrest and eventually of a Communist revolution. Now that was in China successful only in about 1949, but with the fall of the previous dynasty and with the failure of intermediary regimes, the Communists took power and the Communists did something that Communists have often done. This is what Lenin did in the USSR, and it's exactly what happened under Mao. Finally, you find yourself looking at devastating famine, and that is because of collapsing harvest. In China, it was, again, just a totally irrational and autocratic effort on the part of Chairman Mao, as he was known, Mao Zedong. And what it led to was an absolute collapse in harvest, and that led to widespread famine. And we're talking about the deaths of those who are measured in the tens of millions as a result of that famine. Basically in the last 20 years of the 20th century, the Chinese Communist Party sought to bring the nation more in line with modernity, and that meant watching the failure of the Soviet Union, they decided in China economically to try something of a mixed economy, still completely under the control and dominance of the Communist Party. But you have seen in China a resurgent industrialization, and of course a lot of this is because it has adopted what's basically a form of state-controlled capitalism of a sort under the control of the Communist Party. Lots of ironies there, we'll unpack those another day. Now, looking not just at China, but at the world picture, and this invokes Western Europe and the United States, we're looking at the United Nations, other international bodies, very much concerned about what was described as population growth leading to a population explosion. That population explosion we've talked about before, it was one of the worst manipulative ideologies of the 20th century. It was anti-human, it was anti-birth, and it was basically driven by the agenda of modern secular humanism as seen in the globalist class. And you had groups that were looking at the population issue, Rockefeller Foundation, other major foundations and corporations in the United States and elsewhere, they were putting vast sums of money into efforts to try to stop population growth, or at least cut back on population growth. There were people like Paul Ehrlich who were warning that mass starvation, such as was seen in China by the way, would be true worldwide because the burgeoning population simply could not be fed. Now, there were a couple of reasons why that prediction didn't come to pass. One of them was that there was a green revolution in which you had massive increases in agricultural harvest. And so at this point all around the world, thanks to that revolution, you really do not have a problem of starvation because of a lack of food. What we have is a maldistribution in some places of food. Now, as you look at communist nations, one of the very interesting things is that they always take power and claim to hold power in the name of the people, in the name of laborers, in the name of the proletariat, in the name of the people, but it's the people who pay the price. And in many of these regimes, one of the biggest concerns is too many people. And that was especially true of China. China thought it had a simple mathematical formula it had to figure out in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, even into the 90s. That was a question as to whether China wanted to have a continuing increase in birth rate or it wanted to achieve some kind of prosperity, wanted to raise living standards. What was foisted upon China, and this includes the absolute coercion that came about in terms of foreign, I mean by that Western and specifically American government intervention, the effort to try to bring China in line with a free market economy to bring it into the community of nations to improve relations between the United States and China. This included all kinds of exchanges. Lamentably, some of them were intellectual academic exchanges, and you know what was going on in American academia at the time. Also very much in terms of the so-called Club of Rome, the globalist organizations, they came to the conclusion that there were just going to be too many people, and so governments decided, and international groups decided, what we need is a concentrated government-led effort to try to shut down the birth rate. So that meant using contraceptives, and also by the way, not coincidentally, came alongside efforts to legalize abortion. And you also have government-enforced or government-coerced actions. China was one of the worst actors in this regard, but quite honestly, the United States has a lot to answer for in terms of the exercise of our foreign policy in what were then called third-world countries, where quite frankly, we had the ideology of American leftists when it came to an anti-humanism, and that meant anti-natalism against having babies, and that was foisted on many of these third-world countries. Some of them, by the way, India in particular actually had a political revolution simply because the people would not stand for these kinds of ideologies. But China is now facing what's sometimes called a birth-a-dirt, that is, not only a fall-off in the birth rate, but one that actually threatens the continued existence or prosperity of China as a project. Alexander Stephens in reporting for The New York Times puts it this way, declaring childbirth a patriotic act nagging newlyweds about family planning, taxing condoms to get its citizens to have babies, the Chinese Communist Party has pulled every lever. The efforts have largely failed. For the fourth year in a row, China reported more deaths than births in 2025 as its birth rate plunged to a record low, leaving its population smaller and older. Let's talk about numbers. How many babies were born in China in 2025? 7.92 million. Now, that's a lot of babies, almost 8 million babies. But just a year before, it was 9.54 million babies. So the fall-off there is absolutely catastrophic. You talk about something like this on an annual basis, and you can see that China is looking at an absolute birth rate disaster. One of the statistics that governments pay attention to is the number of births for every 1,000 people. As you look at the year 2025, that was 5.63%. That is the lowest level on record since the establishment of the People's Republic of China. And that's now acknowledged by the government itself. All right. So this is a pattern that is increasingly true around the world. It's true in some European countries and some of them are hungry in particular. They have attempted to raise the birth rate by incentives. But in order to understand what's been going on in China, we really need to remind ourselves of a very dark history. That dark history could begin in so many dark places in China's history, and in particular, since the Communist Revolution in 1949. But the thing we need to remember right now is that when it comes to the birth rate, China's Communist Party has one of the most draconian records in all of human history in terms of the effort to try originally to shut down the birth rate. You go back to 1979. In 1979, the Chinese Communist Party adopted what was known as the one child only policy. This was an absolute act of government coercion in which couples were told in China they could have one child and one child only. That one child only policy did have an almost immediate effect. The birth rate started to go down. But the reality, of course, is that the danger facing human beings wasn't too many human beings. It's easy to see why people just looking at the math would think that might be possible. But the reality is that people adjusted their behavior and expectations in such a way that before long, and that's just true in terms of decades, before long, it did become apparent to those who had eyes to see that the problem was not going to be too many babies but too few. But the Chinese Communist Party, and by the way, it was again encouraged by intellectuals and even by government authorities in the West, put in place this one child only policy. They used state power to enforce it. They had local people who were state agents who would go into homes and interrogate couples. They would watch for signs of the illegal act of having a second child. This could come with grave penalties for the family. It also came with forced sterilization, with abortion, and forced abortion, even with infanticide. This leads to another dark dimension of China's history here. That is the fact that the one child only policy became the catalyst for a radical imbalance between males and females in terms of births, or at least in terms of children. That is because, given the historic Confucian-influenced history of China, and this is true throughout the East, there is an incredibly strong boy preference when it comes to babies. This is particularly true for the first baby, but it remains true continuing. And so when you had the one child only policy, there were, it is now believed, millions of young girls who were either aborted, but given the fact that most Chinese people didn't have access to any pre-diagnostic information, including sonograms or anything else. Note, the reality is that this led to the infanticide of untold numbers of baby girls who were simply killed. And the reality is that right now, when you look at the adult population, in particular those who are 30 and above, what China has right now is a radical imbalance of males to female, of men to women. In a matter of fact, the reality is that many millions of men in China and in other Asian nations that are affected, especially by this male preference, they have no hope of marriage because the imbalance is such that there simply aren't enough women. The reality is so many men who are never going to get married, and of course thus never going to have children, the Chinese refer to these men as broken branches, that is, in the family tree with a broken branch. It's extremely sad, and as Christians we understand, there are few things sadder than the subversion, more tragic or more sinful than the subversion of creation order to the extent that the very first command given to human beings to be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth is actually reversed by official government policy, government coercion, government abortion, sterilization, infanticide. It's just horrible. But China began to recognize, just as the 20th century came to a close, that the policy they had adopted was disastrous. But being the Communist Party, it took them 15 years to figure out they had to stop the policy. But even then, they stopped it with an absolute determination to maintain demographic control. So the Chinese Communist Party in 2015 officially canceled the one child only policy, which by the way had been put into China's constitution in 1982. In 2016, the government authorized families, couples to have two children. In 2021, they authorized families to have three children. But you know what? Couples had decided they're going to stop at one, thank you, and many couples, not even one. One of the horrifying worldview dimensions of all of this is that what the Chinese Communist Party did was basically to incentivize people not to have babies, and people got the message, and they liked the incentives, and they have adjusted their behavior and their expectations about their lifetimes in such a way that in many cases, that means a lifetime without marriage, and even if it includes marriage, a lifetime without children. And that is something the Chinese Communist Party is responsible for. But it doesn't, in spite of its coercive power, it's an autocratic totalitarian regime. But you know what? Even an autocratic totalitarian regime can't make couples have babies. All right, so the Western news stories have tended to focus on some of the more interesting dimensions of the Chinese Communist Party of the government's response to this crisis. Again, the government is acknowledging the crisis. And you have official government numbers, but Western authorities are putting a lot of credence in those numbers. They're receiving them as likely to be very close to the fact, particularly when you have a communist government reporting on declining numbers that represents a challenge to the regime. So what's the Chinese Communist Party trying to do? It's trying to incentivize young people to get married and to have children. And it's doing the kind of things that totalitarian governments do. For instance, it's trying to create a disincentive for contraception. So it's adding a rather high tax to contraceptives and to condoms in particular. This has become an issue of derision on the street in China, where people have made it very clear that attacks on condoms is not going to lead to a significant increase in the birth rate. I said that a government really can't force couples to have babies. I presume it could bring about forms of economic and social coercion to try to reverse this trend. One of the NPR reporters said, quote, a decade ago, when the one child policy was scrapped, some Chinese jokingly wondered whether after decades of limiting births, sometimes through forced sterilizations and abortions, the government would now force them to have children. But a government statistician, quote, says that coercion will not work. But what will work is a puzzle no country seems to have solved, end quote. A very interesting comment comes from Cindy Yu, identified as a journalist with the Times of London. There in China, she said that the big question, quote, bothering demographers everywhere is how to get couples to have more babies. And she said, quote, and to be fair, this is not a problem that only China is facing. She continues, quote, there are only theories because actually no population when decline starts actually managed to turn that trend like Japan and like in Taiwan. But some of the theories that go in the Chinese case are, for example, the education of women. We can expect the current female generation to be the most educated cohort of women probably ever in China's millennia of history. And so they have other things to do with their lives, right? Stuff like careers and studying, end quote. Now, this is actually something we're going to need to look at more closely and not just in China, but here in the United States as well. Because this Chinese journalist for the Times of London has put her finger on something that is an undeniable pattern. When you have a significant increase in educational levels among women, you have a significant decrease in the number of children they will eventually bear. Now, worldwide in so far as these patterns are apparent, that appears to be the pattern where you have a radical increase in not only educational ability, but also, of course, professional commitment. What you really find is that women, and they are the determining factor in so many of these cases, at least demographically, the fact is they realign their priorities and babies take on a far lower priority. And again, one of the things we have to recognize here is that when you have a totalitarian government engage in this kind of human planning, what you end up with is a disaster in every single case, whether it was the Soviet Union or when you're looking at communist China. But it's also true that the same trends without the kinds of coercion you saw in China are taking place in nations such as Japan, Taiwan's also mentioned, but also you could look at some other European countries. You're not talking about any pattern of totalitarian coercion. No, in that case, it looks like what you are looking at is the seduction of Western modernity. It turns out there is more than one way to bring about a rapid decrease in birth rate. The problem is, of course, again, as has been recognized, once that is a long-term trend, there is no precedent yet of how it is reversed anywhere. Now one of the phenomena we see, we've been talking about this and it's even reached the attention of the national media and even political analysts. The fact is that when you look at young men becoming more conservative and young women becoming more liberal, we have for the first time, and we mentioned this last year, for the first time in 2025, more young men 15 to 25 were attending church than young women. You also have right now more young men who are indicating they want to be married than young women of the same age. And you're looking at young men saying they want to have children and they want to have more children than many young women. Now I want to argue that at least one exceptional environment for all of that, one context, is evangelical Christianity with Christian families and Christian congregations. It does appear, and this is something we're going to have to watch, it does appear that in most evangelical churches you have what even demographers recognize, and that is a family advantage. And that family advantage comes with significant consequences. And you could put it the other way and say, where that family advantage, that marriage advantage is missing, well that comes with a severe disadvantage. And that becomes very apparent even in the demographic numbers. I'll go back to the way I think this needs to be expressed, and that is when people stop believing in God and start believing in some secular alternative, one of the signs of that happening is they also stop having babies. And that is a pattern that is now increasingly clear. It has the attention of the communist leaders in China because after all they can't have their long sought prosperity if they have more people dying and in say care for the aged than they have being born and they're beginning to populate schools. This is a sign of a society in collapse, not a society with a bright future. And even the Chinese Communist Party can figure that much out. Christians understand the issue is infinitely deeper than anything the communist would understand. Okay, so in worldview analysis, I want us next to look at another big news story. This is in the science section of the New York Times yesterday. Here's the headline, A Drive to Define an Illness, the subhead debating whether to add a separate listing for postpartum psychosis in psychiatry's Bible. Ellen Berry and Pam Bellick are the reporters in the story, and it is about a controversy within psychiatry and medicine as to whether or not postpartum depression should be recognized as a standalone diagnosis. Now, that diagnosis is an official issue because in the world of psychiatry, even in psychology to an extent, but particularly in psychology, this DSM diagnostic and statistical manual in its latest edition, it not only says what is and is not recognized as a psychiatric disorder, it also establishes what clinicians can charge for. Okay, so the subhead in the article pretty accurately sets the stage for what's going on here. You have people who are arguing from within the profession that postpartum depression among women, of course, who had recently had babies, this should be a standalone diagnosis. Now, there's pushback to that. It's also interesting that some of the people who are bringing this argument for a standalone diagnosis, they are also arguing that what postpartum depression is, is a subsection of some bipolar disorder. Now, throughout human history, there's been the recognition that there have been women who struggled with such things after giving birth, that's postpartum depression. And so, even though it affects a relatively small percentage of mothers, that can be a significant number in a large country. But the thing I want to look to here is the fact that the psychiatric profession is really debating whether or not this is a standalone diagnosis. But I want to point to the fact that it was in 1973 that the American Psychiatric Association voted to turn on a dime on the question of homosexuality and homosexual behavior until 1973, that same manual referred to here in this subhead is Psychiatry's Bible, the DSM. It had identified attraction and it was largely male defined. A man to have sexual attraction to another man and to have such mental states, this was defined as a mental illness. But of course, you can't have the sexual revolution and the LGBTQ revolution so long as being gay is a diagnosis. So, it was political activism. No one denies that at this point. It was political activism that led the Psychiatric Association in 1973. Psychologists did so just about the same time to just turn on a dime and redefine it such that it's actually a discomfort with one's sexual orientation as it was defined, which is the psychiatric issue. And so, you look at that and you recognize, okay, this was the absolute surrender of the American Psychiatric Association to the LGBTQ revolution. It wasn't known as that yet, but that's what we know it to be now. And it all came down to this diagnostic manual and even to the codes within it, including whether or not psychiatrists can get paid for these services. And that was an issue of debate on the homosexuality issue in 1973. If you just normalize it, there's no code and there's no income. So, we need to come up with a code and with an official listing of a problem, we need a diagnosis in order to be able to have, well, the bill sent. Before leaving this story, I just want us again to understand how politicized all this is. I'm not denying that there can be any real knowledge here. I'm simply saying that when it comes down to votes like this and arguments such as are found here, it really betrays to a considerable extent what's really going on here in the entire therapeutic world. But there is a section in this article that really caught my eye. Listen to this paragraph. The proposal lays out an argument for including the disorder in the bipolar chapter. It says that most women have mood symptoms and only a subset experience hallucinations without mood symptoms, that the most effective treatments, lithium and electroconvulsive therapy are also first line treatments for bipolar disorder, and that genetic studies have identified a shared risk architecture. New use for the word architecture. And all this comes down to, well, a battle over a diagnostic category. But Christians understand, we just have to understand, there's a lot more going on here. Most fundamentally, a battle of worldviews. I'm speaking to you from Polk County, Florida, and I'll meet you again tomorrow for the brief.
