China reports its current population is 1.42 billion. Yi Fuxian, a University of Wisconsin-Madison academic who studies Chinese demography, believes that number is far too high. He’s right. Nonetheless, China is at least four times more populous than the United States. But the great disparity will not last. China is on the brink of a demographic cliff.

By the turn of the century, the US might even have more people than China. Yi believes that country could have as few as 330 million people when the clock strikes 2100. Then, America, according to the US Census Bureau, will have 366 million.

China is now heading to history’s greatest drop in population in the absence of war. “Left unaddressed, China’s demographic trap could precipitate a civilizational collapse,” Yi warns Beijing.

The sheer size of China awes foreigners — and instills great pride in its people. “What is the real fulcrum of China’s strength?” asked a popular Chinese website in 2009. There was a one-word answer: “Population!”

And as the anonymous “Fang Feng” posted on the Strong Country Forum of the Communist Party’s People’s Daily when China’s population was still growing, “More people means more power.”

Fewer people, then, means less power. 

China’s leaders have been trying just about everything to stabilize the falling population. The effort dates back to before the country peaked, according to official reporting, in 2021. 

So far, nothing has worked. As Wang Feng of the University of California, Irvine points out, “No country has successfully raised fertility with government policies.”

As demographics expert Nicholas Eberstadt of the American Enterprise Institute said, “It is possible to use bayonets and police power to force birth rates down against the will of a people; it is very much more difficult to use state force to push birth rates up.”

The Chinese government, however, has a solution: growing babies in machines “Matrix”-style, as Zhao DaShuai, a self-described propagandist for the Chinese military, suggested in 2023. “Sooner or later, reproduction will be an industrialized process; it’s the only way to maintain a healthy birthrate,” she wrote. 

If the country cannot maintain that birthrate, the alternative is precipitous decline. As Yi argues, such decline will affect China’s relations with all other countries. Its demographic failure, he told The Post this month, will lead to “a fundamental reassessment of China’s trajectory, US-China relations, and broader global economic and geopolitical trends.”

Fortunately, as China’s population shrinks fast, the nation could become benign. Charles Burton of the Sinopsis think tank says that “China’s aging population will tend to slow growth, and slow growth will intensify domestic pressures and push the regime to prioritize stability through increased surveillance, security spending, and propaganda.”

Peaceful post-war Japan is perhaps the best example of how falling population affects geopolitical ambition. Yet as Eberstadt explains, history offers examples to the contrary: Some graying societies, such as Germany in the 1930s and Serbia in the 1990s, were particularly violent and aggressive.

Add China to the list of the likely violent. There is a link between a high number of unmarriable males — so-called bare branches — and a nation’s adoption of risk-taking foreign policies. “The security logic of high-sex-ratio cultures predisposes nations to see some utility in interstate conflict,” argue Valerie Hudson and Andrea den Boer in their much-discussed “Bare Branches: The Security Implications of Asia’s Surplus Male Population.”

China’s one-child policy resulted in some of the planet’s most skewed sex ratios as couples wanted their only child to be male to continue bloodlines. The result was tens of millions of excess men. Chinese leaders throughout millennia have seen the benefit of directing the destructive energies of young males at foreigners, instead of letting them mill around the country disrupting Chinese society.

Moreover, Xi Jinping may see a closing window to achieve his grand ambitions — he has been pushing the imperial-era belief that Chinese emperors had an obligation to rule tianxia or “all under Heaven” — and so may be impelled to act sooner rather than later to fulfill his goals. 

After all, intimidation is the core of Xi’s diplomacy. “No one is going to bow down to a country quickly transitioning from giant to midget,” according to Blaine Holt, a China analyst and retired US Air Force general. “Xi, if he is to achieve his ambitions, has to act fast or not at all.” 

Expect Xi to act fast: He must know by now his China has no answer for population collapse.

Gordon G. Chang is the author of “Plan Red: China’s Project to Destroy America” and “The Coming Collapse of China.” Follow him on X @GordonGChang.