An enormous population has long been a foundational way for China to project its strength. But anxiety about managing so many mouths has always loomed. Mao Zedong said in 1957 that “China has a population of 600 million people, and we must never forget this fact,” Then there was a famine. China’s masses, though, are getting to be less massive. And that’s precisely the problem. Birth rate numbers released Monday were the lowest since Mao’s Communists established the People’s Republic in 1949. They're the latest development in a millennia-long struggle in China, where the act of producing children has been part of the national conversation since the earliest days.
