 All right, for the first time since the early 1960s when Mao starved millions and millions of his own population, the population of China is actually showed a decline. Now let me just say that this is assuming we believe Chinese numbers because it is indeed hard to tell what is actually going on in China and they are demographers and they are commentators out there claiming that China's population, Peter Zeen in particular, that China's population has been declining for several years now, but according to official Chinese statistics, for the first time since the early 1980s, China's population fell by 850,000 people to 1.41 billion and the country had 9.56 million booths, 10.41 million deaths and population shrinking, young people 16 to 59, you could think of it as working age population has also gone down to 62% from 62.5%. I mean, these are significant numbers, the expectation is that this will continue, that this will continue significantly until in the 2021, so a tiny little increase in population. Now part of this is COVID, but COVID, you know, we'll see I think the impacts of COVID more in the 2023 numbers, China is announcing as declared the 60,000, they had 60,000 COVID deaths between December 8th and January 12th, but nobody believes that number, everybody who looks at what's happening in Chinese hospitals and what's happening in Chinese cities believes the number is much, much larger than that, maybe 10 to 20 times larger than that. Very few people, China has a foreign workforce, but they don't count those in the population because foreigners, I don't think foreigners can become Chinese, but they also have, you know, one of their big problems is where they're gonna have to allow some immigration is that they have way too many men and too few women, so as a consequence of the one child policy, not only did they gain a shrinking population, one child is not enough for a placement, but they also, there was a lot of self-selecting for boys over girls, so what happens is that there's an entire, I think two generations of Chinese, where there are way more men than women, and therefore they're not going to be able to have that many kids at all because there's just not of marriages unless they allow immigration of women into the country for the purposes of marriage, which they might do, who knows, I don't think they have done, but they might do in the future. There are foreign workers by million in southern China, and certainly in place like Shanghai, but they don't count them in these statistics, and they don't count them as immigrants, as technically immigrants. The other thing that was announced this week is that China reported its lowest GDP number in, I think the only other year was 2020, that COVID year at 3% for 2022, it's much lower than previous Chinese government targets, it's significant lower than the high growth rate of China's last 40 years. I think American investors and European investors, or generally investors, are pouring a lot of money right now into China, into Chinese markets, into Chinese companies under the assumption that now that China's opened up, and now in a sense that they're getting COVID out of their system, that what's going to happen as a consequence is the Chinese economy is going to boom, and we're going to go back to the good old days, and this is a great time to be investing in China. Let me just say I'm skeptical, I think that slower economic growth is what's installed for China in the future, at least as long as Xi maintains his commitment to central planning. I think it's probably foolhardiedly to jump in with such enthusiasm as it seems like foreign investors are. Now a lot of times the foreign investors, it's funny because a lot of the foreign investors investing in China tend to be Taiwanese, for example, or Chinese from overseas. Taiwanese should know better than anybody, and it's funny that Taiwan being under constant threat of Chinese invasion is maybe the biggest investor in mainland China, one of the biggest investors in mainland China, per capita, certainly the biggest investor in mainland China, and making it possible for them to build up the resources that would make an invasion of Taiwan possible. It's a bizarre world in which we live, in which the victims are constantly sanctioning the aggressors and constantly supporting the aggressors. So that's just a little bit more in China. I'm sure we'll be talking more in China as the year develops. There's going to be a lot of foreign policy and economic issues that China is going to be involved in, and of course it's going to be interesting to see how COVID ultimately lands up playing out in China. Chinese population shrinking, as I told you it would, and that's going to accelerate. And by the way, that is expanding population is pro-growth, economic growth, just a pure growth perspective. Shrinking population is a challenge for growth. So it's going to be interesting to see how China deals with these challenges. It's going to try to bribe people to have kids, but that doesn't seem to work and doesn't seem to work anyway in the modern world. You can do that by going to youronbrookshow.com slash support by going to Patreon, subscribe star, locals, and just making an appropriate contribution on any one of those channels. 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