Wednesday, January 21, 2026

It's Wednesday, January 21st, 2026.

I'm Albert Mulder, 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 felt a 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 communist took power and the communist did something that communist have often done.

This is what Lenin did in the USSR and it's exactly what happened under Mao.

Eventually, 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 Sei-Tun.

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.

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 in 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 Early 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 with 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 paid 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, and 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.

These 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 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 Stevens and 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 is 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 hungry in particular.

They have attempted to raise the birth rate by incentives.

And 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 or 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 great penalties for the family.

And it also came with forced sterilization, with abortion and forced abortion, even

with infanticide.

And this leads to another dark dimension of China's history here.

And 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.

And that is because given the historic confusion and influence 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.

And 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 of so many men who are never going to get married, and of course, this 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

this 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, and fantasize, 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 it 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 well-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 the Chinese Communist Party trying to do is 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.

But 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 birth, 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 as 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 the coin 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't 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.

So 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 re-align 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 were 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 can 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 the 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

age it, then 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 world view 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 post-partum psychosis in psychiatry's Bible.

Lundberry and Pam Belich are the reporters in the story, and it is about a controversy

within psychiatry and medicine as to whether or not post-partum 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

and 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 post-partum 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 post-partum depression 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, thus post-partum 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.

Now 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

to diagnosis in order to be able to have, well, the bill's 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 that 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 experienced 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, in quote, new use for the word architecture.

When all this comes down to 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.

Thanks for listening to the briefing.

For more information on my website at AlbertMohler.com, you can follow me on exor twitter by going

x.com forward slash AlbertMohler for information on the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary

Go to spgs.edu.

For information on boys college, just go to boyscovis.com.

I'm speaking to you from Pope County Florida and I'll meet you again tomorrow for the

briefing.