FINALLY, SOME ANSWERS TO THE GLOBAL BABY SHORTAGE

THERE ARE GLIMMERINGS of an answer to the worrying global baby shortage. But they are not being found in liberal places.

The offering of government incentives to inspire people to have more children have largely failed—but now it’s clear that a few exceptions have seen a small measure of success: four examples are given below.

The “big picture” answer is surprising simple: governments should skew the incentives to prompt very young adults, in their late teens or early 20s, to have a more classic outlook (get a job, find a partner, set up a home, have children) rather than an overly modernistic one (explore your individuality, find personal fulfilment, worry about everything else later).

WEST AND EAST SHARE THE PROBLEM

In modern, progressive, secular societies, most people marry late or don’t get married at all, and have zero, one, or two children. Most western countries follow that scenario, as do the most westernized East Asian societies (South Korea, Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore). All suffer from falling populations.

But since time immemorial, men and women married in their teens or early 20s and had children before 25. This is still true in conservative societies with strong faith traditions, such as the African nations, Afghanistan, the Central Asian nations, Pakistan, and so on.

FOUR PLACES ARE SEEING SOME SUCCESS

How to encourage a return to this classic family lifestyle? The Chinese province of Zhejiang started to offer cash to couples who married, but only if they were below the age of 25.

Hungary decreed that women who have their first child in their 20s will be exempt from income tax. But if they reach 30? Forget it.

Russia made a similar offer of freedom from income tax to its women, but only if they had their first baby by 25.

Israel has long been experimenting with policies which give child grants to couples which only kick in after their third or fourth child, forcing parents to “start early” and opt for a big family.

In all four cases, limiting benefits to younger adults have led to positive results.

What is the effect of making couples marry and procreate earlier? It seems to “snap” them back into the traditional parents model—and once they have one child, many of them choose to have more.

The Zhejiang model can be tried elsewhere in China—but it’s a big country with very diverse populations, which means there’s no guarantee of success.

MODERNISM IS ANTI-EVOLUTIONARY

The finding should not be a surprise. It’s long been known that people who follow a more traditional pattern of life have more children. Steve Jones, a London-based professor of genetics, made a stir in the early 2010s when he pointed out that societies with widespread atheism tended to fail to have the necessary 2.1 children, thus eventually wiping themselves out. Modernism, it seems, is anti-evolutionary.

This doesn’t mean you have to follow a particular religion or even believe in God or a god. Chinese people are generally not monotheists but traditional family structures are strongly imprinted in their thinking.

Making use of this knowledge in a modern context is what humanity needs, and targeting incentives to young adults, with a Leonardo Di Caprio “deadline” of 25 seems to be an answer. You can’t force people to adopt a more conservative or traditional or spiritual attitude, but you can encourage them to marry earlier, have their first child earlier, and then see what happens.

This suggests that places like Hong Kong, which is simply offering cash lump sums to people who have babies with no stipulations for age, won’t solve its problem.

But the finding is also a challenge for mainland China’s present government, which is having to work hard to reverse earlier leaders’ negativity towards the country’s own history.

AN INTEREST IN HISTORY

The good news is that modern Chinese, even young ones, do have an appreciation for their community’s cultural past, even to the extent of wearing hanfu traditional clothing. The hostility of western countries has made many young Chinese more nationalistic.

MARRIAGE MINIMUMS IN CHINA

Ancient records show that the Chinese government decreed in or around 680 BC that men should be able to marry from 20 and women from 15.

During periods of instability, such as from the Wei Dynasty onwards (AD 266) the government worried about the low birth rate, and minimum marriage ages were revised downwards – boys could wed at 15 and girls at 13.

The more stable Song Dynasty (from 960 AD) saw the age revised slightly upwards to 16 for men and 14 for women.

Today in China, it’s 22 for men and 20 for women—although there is much discussion about lowering it to 18 for both.

Clearly, the findings from China’s own history, plus the modern results being filed from Zhejiang, Hungary, Russia and Israel, indicate that allowing people to start earlier would be a good idea.

by Nury Vittachi 

Lai See(利是)

** The blog article is the sole responsibility of the author and does not represent the position of our company. **

Hong Kong prevented an anti-China operative from a CIA-derived operation entering the city – but the mainstream media is pretending she was no more than an innocent grandmother visiting her grandchild.

The way the story has been twisted is actually pretty funny.

"MP refused entry to Hong Kong on visit to see newborn grandson", says the UK Sunday Times in a report at the start of this week—and which soon picked up by multiple media worldwide. Aww!

The woman, Wera Hobhouse, is quoted as saying: "I want to see my grandson, I want to cuddle him." But she was told to go home. She added: "I didn’t cry but I was very close to tears.”

ANTI-CHINA NARRATIVE
Then UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy, friend of Netanyahu, put in his thoughts: "Unjustified restrictions on freedom of movement can only serve to further undermine Hong Kong’s international reputation.”

In other words, this is all a standard attempt by western journalists to feed a fake anti-Hong Kong narrative by hiding the most important stories.

Which I am going to tell you.

THE REAL STORY
The story starts many years ago. After being repeatedly caught doing illegal black ops, the CIA decided to spin off a portion of its overseas work under a nicer-sounding name – the National Endowment for Democracy, or the NED.

This group continued the CIA's global specialties: political interference worldwide, and endless demonization of US rivals, especially China.

By 2020, the US had a terrible reputation for meddling in the affairs of other countries, and people were becoming wise to what the NED was really about. What to do now? The US State Department decided to set up a unit that would feel non-American.

So the US chose to start a new front organisation with their most servile supporters, the UK and Japan. It would start in the UK and then expand to draw as many European nations as possible, and then other countries too.

So the NED teamed up with its frequent partner organization, the OSF, a political interference body funded by a US billionaire named George Soros.
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In June of 2020, they financed a new group called the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China, or IPAC—notice that it doesn't sound American – most people think it is British.

A few months later, the Americans launched a Japanese branch of IPAC.

BRITISH FACE
The face of it was a British man named Luke de Pulford, notorious for his harshly negative opinion of the Chinese. Its mission was to act cultivate negativity towards China in other countries – or, to use its own mission statement, it was to work as an "international cross-party group of legislators working towards reform on how democratic countries approach China."

The trouble was that if you looked closely at it, it did look like an obvious CIA anti-China operation. Fortunately (for them), the western mainstream media were very happy to write endless anti-China articles quoting IPAC and without mentioning the CIA or the NED or the OFS.

"A lot of people didn't want to be doing something that seemed to be doing the foreign policy bidding of the United States, so the way we built this thing had to feel to them that it was authentically cross-party," de Pulford told the Nikkei Weekly, an anti-China publication.

VIOLENCE, JIMMY LAI AND IPAC
Since then, IPAC has engaged in huge amounts of anti-Chinese activity. When Jimmy Lai was engaging with shockingly violent groups causing mayhem in Hong Kong, there were numerous communications with IPAC found on his phone.

In court, Jimmy Lai said that de Pulford contacted him so often that he became a nuisance.

HOBHOUSE DIVIDES WORLD INTO TWO
IPAC's mission is to foster division and prevent peace.

When French leader Emmanuel Macron said that the Chinese and Europeans should work together (and said something peace-cultivating about Taiwan), IPAC issued a harsh statement saying: "Monsieur le president, you do not speak for Europe."

Ms Hobhouse and her colleagues at IPAC have become the motherlode of demonization of China.

Ms Hobhouse obediently pushes the CIA narrative on Tibet, and on Taiwan, and sees the world divided into two – the glorious "free world", the one currently led by Mr Trump, and the rest of the world. That tells us a lot about her.

HARMING THE HONG KONG PEOPLE
So, in summary, the CIA set up the NED as a front organization, and the NED worked with Soros to set up IPAC as a front organization to push US foreign policy on China in countries outside the US.

IPAC has caused immense harm to the innocent people of Hong Kong, pushing for huge amounts of sanctions, demonizing us and punishing our community in numerous ways – punishments we have done nothing to deserve.

Those are the facts. Now you decide. Is she best described as a grandmother coming to visit her baby? Or is there more to the story? You decide.

by Nury Vittachi