Few suspected it would come to this. Yet in Hampshire alone, the population of under-15s has shrunk by 2%, leading to the closure of two other primary schools and half-a-dozen mergers. Nor is Jane Austen country alone. In the past two years, 40 state-funded primary schools have shut nationwide. The reason is simple: not enough Britons want to have children. For any country’s population to remain stable, its total fertility rate needs to be at or above an average of 2.1 live births per woman. Britain’s fertility rate is 1.39. If this trend continues, our population will peak at 71 million in 2034, before dropping to as low as 48 million by 2100.

This is a global phenomenon. Birth rates are tanking from Australia to India, from the US to Uruguay, while the populations of countries including South Korea and Germany have already started to shrink. This is not a good thing. Your instinct may be that, with fewer people around, there will be less competition for resources and fewer carbon emissions pumped into the atmosphere. This is true, and immaterial: there may be less competition for minerals, say, but also fewer people to mine and process them, and Elon Musk’s Optimus butlers are a bet more than a certainty. Nor is depopulation easy to reverse. From encouraging letters (France) and tax incentives (Hungary) to limits on abortion (Russia), countries have tried everything, to no avail. Immigration doesn’t work either, not when the birth rates of new arrivals slow too.

What, then, will life be like in a world with fewer children? In places like Smannell and Hatherden, Fitchet argues, a feeling of managed decline will only accelerate. In these villages, he explains, primary schools are “the places where the families meet, the places where friendships begin, where generations put down roots” — the last place, in other words, that is likely to attract younger families to these places where the post office and the pub have long since vanished. Something similar will happen to our towns and cities. The daytime squeal of toddlers in trolley seats will diminish in our supermarkets, swimming pools and parkland. Other aspects of our social contract will also begin to fray. Expect emergency service provision in rural areas to experience further cuts, as budgets for ambulances, police and on-call fire stations are reprioritized to areas of greater population density.

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Some big inter-generational resentments are also coming. A declining birth rate means, inevitably, that a diminishing number of young people are paying for the pensions of the old, the fiscal equivalent of a sweaty, inverted human pyramid. Do not expect the triple lock to hold. If current trends continue, the Office for Budget Responsibility said last year, healthcare and pensions spending will push government debt to 270% of GDP by the 2070s (it is currently 93.8%). According to a report by Policy Exchange, budget stabilization under this regime would require income tax to rise between 1.4-7.4% per taxpayer. The recruitment and retention crises currently facing the NHS and the social care sector will worsen. Managers running our old people’s homes will either need to increase the workload of their already-harried nursing staff or embrace the Japanese model of employing more robots (though some have argued this just makes life for caregivers even busier).

The British government should avoid this fiscal disaster, says David Miles, an economist at Imperial College London — provided it is willing to make some hard choices. One is making sure that the retirement age is realistic. “The majority of people, including the over-65s and maybe well into their seventies, are perfectly capable of some work,” Miles continues, arguing that a return to the original idea of the old-age pension as a stipend received in the last decade of life, rather than the last quarter, is logical. Pervasive ageism in the economy, he continues, will disappear once it becomes clear that an oversupply of eager young adults is a thing of the past. This assumes that older citizens can be persuaded to vote for a government that spends radically less on their pensions. That might happen by mid-century, by which time the demise of the Baby Boomers will have resulted in a wealth transfer of an estimated £5.5 trillion to Millennials.

Of course, there’s always the possibility that technology will have saved us by 2050, with robots and AI ensuring we live in a less crowded, less competitive archipelago. Dean Spears and Michael Geruso are skeptical on that point. As they convincingly argue in their depopulation jeremiad, After the Spike, innovation is an incremental byproduct of a growing population: the more people you have around, the more minds capable of conceiving and communicating billions of tiny improvements to our daily lives.

Depopulation kicks the stool from beneath this framework. History begins to slow, then reverse. By the 22nd century, we will probably still know how to deflect an asteroid, but we may not be able to build the rocket to do so in time, much less put our minds together to find the cure to the next pandemic-causing virus. Similar regressions have happened before. Take the development of cement, the recipe for which was perfected under the Roman Empire only to be lost for centuries after the collapse of imperial authority — and its population — in the 5th century. A counterargument to this might be the technological progress Europe ended up making after the Black Death, which culled about half of its population. But one wonders whether the AI-addled mind will cope as well as its medieval antecedents as our towns and cities start to empty.

Why should that be important to anyone living today? Though the decision to have children must always fall to individual couples, the fact that so many are choosing either to wait or skip altogether points to much deeper failings in our society. These are failings we should all care about and try, collectively, to mitigate by acting or voting for change, whether that’s related to global warming and pervasive air pollution, to the deteriorating quality of our food, the cost of living, or the daily horrors meted out to new mothers on maternity wards.

Anastasia Berg suspects it’s deeper than all that. A philosopher at the University of California, Irvine and the co-author of What Are Children For?, Berg points to Norway as an example of a place that has invested significantly in its education, healthcare and childcare systems — and yet still faces a declining birth rate. What’s actually happened, argues Berg and her co-author Rachel Wiseman, is a nigh-on unprecedented shift in attitudes toward parenthood itself in Western culture. Men and women now feel free to prioritize their career, finding the right partner, or simply living a life free of the responsibility of raising a tiny human. “Through all these domains, there are these paradigms that all point away from the possibility of having children,” says Berg. “They conspire to a situation where we kind of tolerate children as a kind of consumer choice, like we tolerate one another ordering from Amazon, even though we know we shouldn’t.”

In some ways, perhaps, this liberation should be celebrated: at no point in history has the individual, man or woman, had so much agency to define the course of their lives. If that course involves couples deciding that having children is not for them, that’s also completely fine. Berg agrees, but also observes that the culmination of this sense of agency is an odd sense of ambivalence in our culture toward parenthood, one amplified by a slew of podcasts, films, novels and television dramas that portray raising children as, at best, something that can wait, and at worst, completely thankless. In the end, all these possibilities crowd out the nuanced arguments that can be made for having children, suggests the philosopher, especially among women. “If feminism is about empowering women and knowledge is power,” Berg says, “then we need to make sure that people have all the knowledge from the start so they can really plan out the course of their lives and not feel like they were hoodwinked.”

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It is impossible to avoid thinking that this is leading to a vast loss for society at large. As a father myself — of a two-year-old daughter, currently gathering shoes by our backdoor in the hope of a trip out, instead of one to her nightly bath — I am biased. Others make the case more eloquently. In his 1994 work The Philosophy of Childhood, Gareth Matthews convincingly argues that the child is much more than an adult-in-waiting, but someone who fundamentally changes the parent and caregiver. Children are irrepressibly curious, bold, unconstrained by the mental shackles imposed by year after year of toil, grief and accumulating responsibilities. They grant us new and bright perspectives about the world around us, pushing us to improve ourselves and our collective circumstances. Absent their plaintive cries and squeals of delight, society can only ossify. The world of adults is the world of compromises, the end of idealism.

I think, here, of Levin’s epiphany in Anna Karenina, his face lit up by summer storms, smiling at the gleaming sense of purpose brought into his life by his infant son. If God were to live anywhere, it would be in the laughter of children. You can hear it anywhere and benefit. Amid so many looming dangers, says Fitchet, “kicking a football around in a field, or going to a park and watching kids run around and scream and play with each other, makes that all disappear for a few minutes, because they’re completely oblivious to all of this.” For them, the world is a marvelous thing — and only just beginning.

It was a good time to be a Millennial girlboss in 2018. #MeToo was tearing through institutions and canceling pervs. Beyoncé became Coachella’s first black female headliner, a phenomenon known as “Beychella” (bonus points for the cringe portmanteau). Blogs such as Jezebel, Man Repeller and Refinery29 were still setting the agenda, before their bathetic banishment into internet irrelevance. In Washington, too, girlbosses were making their mark. A record-breaking 102 women entered Congress that year, with four newly minted representatives kickin’ butt under the nickname “The Squad”. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the most famous and divisive of the lot, told an interviewer that she and her squadmates — Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley and Rashida Tlaib — in fact preferred to call themselves the Spice Girls. As she explained: “We’re sisters, not clones.”

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But what had Kruger actually said that was so offensive? That Zoomer women’s wombs were factories for future taxpayers? That a Reform government would go full-Hungary, scrapping income tax for mothers of three or more? That they’d ban abortion? 

Wrong! Kruger said: “I’m not interested in your love life… But I am interested in the framework in which you make your decisions, and I’d like the framework to be more pro-social.” There were no plans to touch no-fault divorces, no handmaidens, no mothers’ medals after all. The biggest thing these anti-woman fascists wanted to do seemed to be to introduce household taxation… are you getting all this, Atwood? Labour’s faux-outrage, an opportunity for a tidy bit of political point-scoring, seemed for naught.

For Kruger is perfectly correct in his suggestion that young women’s choices, especially around fertility, are influenced by society’s messaging around motherhood. Research that may surprise those readers sold on the idea of Gen Z as cat ladies-in-waiting reveals that about 92% of young women want children one day. Whether they’ll have them is a different matter entirely.

Why? The assumption, particularly among trad types online, is that old chestnut: women, the gatekeepers of fertility, are selfish and misled. We are said to desire only career advancement for its own sake, or meaningless casual sex, or to spend any disposable income on baby-replacements in the form of houseplants, toys and small dogs. A straw poll of Zoomer life goals over the next few years would admittedly bear this out: the women I know would tell you they want to travel, to meet someone, to get a dog or a better job. Wiping dribble off a baby’s chin hardly gets a look-in — but all but one of my friends ultimately desires motherhood. But will they have children? What is it about our current sexual culture — or the “sexual economy”, as Kruger called it — that might prevent them? 

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The Center for Social Justice, in a determined attempt to crack the case of tottering birth rates, recently identified 600,000 “missing mothers” — that is, women in the UK who want children one day but are probably going to miss out because of insecure housing, extortionate childcare costs and even environmental doomerism. But buried amid female economic woes was a purported solution: a call to arms for the other party in the business of babymaking. The father. 

For once, it was not just the cosmo-swigging career girls being scolded for not having babies; this time, actual researchers had spent more than 10 seconds thinking about the sexual marketplace and discovered that the Zoomer men expected to sire the next generation were not exactly up to snuff. (Of course, they might have realized this with a five-minute scroll through Hinge… but they got there in the end). Yes, the study found, our future baby daddies were both desperately unprepared and desperately unprepossessing as potential mates. This delayed maturation of today’s men means that their adolescence now extends well into their twenties. “The average age of leaving home for a young man sits at 25, three years older than for young women.” 

Of course, women often also find themselves in a state of suspended adolescence, reliant on parental funds and living in godforsaken houseshares with collections of cuddly toys — but the report found that male “readiness” for children was a critical factor for those women who were ready themselves. Its suggestions make perfect sense: “Start adulthood earlier — especially for men.” Reduce the school leaving age and the number of young people in higher education; get them, and especially the blokes — who are increasingly festering into a cohort of NEETs — into the workforce. Parental dependence is emasculating, off-putting and disastrous for self-esteem; politicians who are quick to point the finger at feminism for driving women to look for baby substitutes at cat shelters should only be taken seriously when they consider the problem of male listlessness. Much effort has been expended on the project of “changing women’s minds” about having babies — but when we already know we want them, it’s time to start considering what, or who, is getting in the way.

For Zoomettes, the banquet of potential partners cheffed up by the NEET pandemic is unappetizing indeed. Directionless dolts clog up dating apps, offering non-committal porn-infected sex interrupted by the periodic flushing of the loo by one of ten thousand housemates in his Flatbush flatshare. If you were us, would you have his child? My suspicion is that many more women would be more receptive to the delights of family life if the pick of husbands weren’t limply balding their way through their thirties until their bands “really take off”. The thought often occurs to me when I run into other women picking up their contraceptives from the pharmacy. Who’d do otherwise? After all, if you’re dating a man whose lifestyle is essentially unchanged since their teens, his suggestion that you have a baby is like a 10-year-old telling you they really really really want a puppy. Who’s gonna be doing all the work?

We are all to blame for tanking birth rates — and we will all suffer the consequences. But the tradition of giving women a kicking as the perpetrators is looking shabbier by the day. The reasoning that women are cold and selfish victors in a post-feminist world has never been borne out, not since Theodore Roosevelt was describing “the woman who deliberately avoids motherhood” as “in effect a criminal against the race”, nor even when JD Vance bemoaned that his country was run by a league of “childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives”. 

It’s not that young women today don’t want children — ask them, as Vance probably never has, and you’ll realize they do. It’s that they would be foolish to center their lives around wanting them when the pool of potential partners is so desperately dank. Any government serious about helping those women who do want to become mothers must give up their “this-is-what-a-feminist-looks-like” act and stop being squeamish about pro-maternal policy. There is nothing anti-feminist about bringing about conditions in which women who want children end up having them; the radical solution is to stop yelling at we twentysomethings and lick the leagues of would-be fathers into shape first. Would Daniella Kruger want Mr Neet McNojob sulking around her house amid a rising pile of nappies? Me neither.

Yet today we are lurching towards a society where sexual intimacy and family life are being undermined at the most basic levels. The impact can be seen in shifting dating patterns and declining rates of marriage, family formation and childbirth. And this is no longer a Western disease; a majority of the world’s people live in countries with fertility rates well below replacement level; by 2050, some 61 countries are expected to experience population decline.

To some extent, the roots of this war between the sexes is economic, exacerbated by the global “cost-of-living” crisis stemming from house price increases relative to incomes, higher energy and food costs. With hopes of a steady career and home ownership fading, many young people now choose to, or are forced to, adopt a lifestyle incompatible with marriage and family. 

This is most evidenced in the West by the rapid shift away from not only family but heterosexual engagement overall. But in East Asia, the breakdown in male-female relations is if anything, starker. In Japan, for instance, the harbinger of modern Asian demographics, one in four people in their twenties and thirties are virgins. Indeed, the Japanese even have a term — herbivores — for the passive, desexed generation of young men.

So too with China, which, despite once being renowned for its strong familial culture, is now home to 200 million unmarried adults. Once virtually unimaginable, the proportion of adults aged 17-36 living alone in China has risen to nearly 70%. Marriage and childbirth, notes one Chinese Gen Z, have become “almost synonymous with the stress of life for us young people”.

And this does not simply represent a demographic crisis — but inevitably a political one too. We cannot know the political implications of the current war of the sexes in societies such as China and Russia, where civic life is strictly controlled. But in the US, new fractures are becoming more pronounced. Most obviously, women, particularly single women, now provide the base for progressive politics. Similarly in Canada, according to a 2020 poll, women favoured the Liberals by two to one while men slightly tilted to the conservatives. 

Now, the existence of a political gender gap is nothing new — but, according to recent Gallup surveys, it is now five times bigger than in 2000. Survey data has found that from 1999 to 2013, about three in ten women aged 18 to 29 consistently identified as liberal but rose to 40% in 2023. And crucially, Gallup interprets these changes as “stronger-than-average pro-liberal shifts”, particularly in elite colleges. 

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In sharp contrast, an increasing proportion of men, particularly in the working class, are embracing Right-wing causes. Just like their American counterparts, who are increasingly supportive of Donald Trump, European men under 30, are also shifting to the Right. Meanwhile, in Korea, the Right-wing shift among young males was sufficient enough to put a Right-wing “anti-feminist” into the Presidency. 

Likewise, a post-sexual society in the West will not be a pretty picture. For one thing, the breakdown of sex relations undermines the traditional focus on long-term wealth creation within families. Married people, for example, aided by the mingling of spousal resources, account for 77% of all US homeowners. But when society no longer places the same value on such a traditional focus, calls for government assistance can be irresistible.

Rather than seek to bolster the prospects for young families, there are growing calls to expand such things as rent subsidies or direct transfers. At a recent campaign stop in Atlanta, speaking to over 10,000 supporters, Kamala Harris pledged to “take on corporate landlords and cap unfair rent increases”. This latest statement mirrors her earlier position before Biden withdrawal where Harris shared on X her belief that “Every American deserves affordable housing”. This refers to the Biden administration’s call to cap rent increases by 5% on landlords with 50 or more rental units or risk losing federal tax breaks. She has also called for Medicare for all, essentially replacing employer-based healthcare , until she decided to backtrack from this unpopular stance.

For many, the idea of family solidarity has all but disappeared as a primary source of support. Rather than being progressive, as is often suggested, the sexual war and the decline of familialism seem likely to accelerate societal decline, mirroring the plague-cursed Medieval period when as much as 15% of the population was estimated to have been permanently celibate and when classical values about the primacy of family tended to fade before theological concerns. As Richard Reeves has noted: “You don’t upend a 12,000-year-old social order without experiencing cultural side effects.” 

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The future, it seems, will belong to those largely disconnected individuals who somehow find a way to negotiate what the US Surgeon General has described as an epidemic of loneliness. Already by 2020, 28% of all occupied homes in the US were one-person households, up from just 8% in 1940. Three years later, Pew found that 10% of Americans had no close friends. 

But this is not just an American tragedy. Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong and now China are evolving similarly. In Japan, the number of people living alone is expected to reach 40% of the whole population by 2040. Already, there are estimated to be 4,000 “lonely deaths” in Japan every week. 

Changes in sexual relations are of course inevitable and, in some ways, liberating for individuals. But on a mass basis, the sexual war represents a critical civilisational challenge. As one seminal study from Singapore has noted, family buttresses not just society but serves as “the primary source of emotional, economic and financial support” for individuals and as the best way to “protect society from the negative fallouts” of a competitive economy. Without a strong family structure, individuals can be cast adrift, looking to material pleasures, government aid and virtual worlds for comfort.

If not addressed, the decline in sexual relations suggests a very dystopian future, in which only the elderly population grows, while children and families become rarer and more stressed. Governments — whether in America, France, Japan or Scandinavia — have not found an effective way to slow this process. That may be because this is more a matter of spirit, than just incentives. What is needed is nothing less than a rediscovery of romantic love and embracing the value of nurturing offspring. Freud may have exposed the seamy side of family life, but he still understands that it stands at the centre of any successful human civilisation.  

This development is not exactly a surprise, but it has arrived sooner than expected. Overwhelmingly to blame is the plummeting birth rate — something that, you may point out, the Chinese state would once have celebrated. The nation’s One-Child Policy is the stuff of Geography textbooks everywhere. Whereas the Communist lunacy of the Great Leap Forward was relatively easy to reverse, the One-Child Policy — which cruelly persecuted and hounded people who wanted to have two children, never mind three — casts a long shadow.

But to blame it for China’s current demographic crisis is too easy. Egregious though the One-Child Policy was, it is not at the root of the nation’s current problems; it merely brought them on earlier than would otherwise have been the case. In the Seventies, before the policy was introduced, China’s fertility rate fell precipitously, halving from around six to around three children per woman in the course of a decade. It would have continued to nose-dive even without intervention.

The underlying reason for the lack of births in China is fairly obvious. The nation has developed. And urban, wealthy, educated people do not have large families — often choosing not to have children at all. Economic and cultural factors may differ a little between nations, but this is pretty much true the world over. It’s intriguing, then, that young Chinese people blame a lack of prosperity for their reluctance to have children; the Guardian reports one Weibo user posting, “Now who dares to have children, housing prices are so expensive.”

What has really changed is not economics, but expectations. When prosperous professionals have a sixth of the offspring their penurious peasant grandparents produced, lack of funds cannot be the ultimate explanation. The issue here is not material well-being; it is the matter of how one’s affluence compares to what one’s peers are experiencing. In days of old, people had large families in hovels not knowing where the next meal would come from. Today, quite understandably, the new normal is to want a decent home and a degree of financial security.

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The consequences of this demographic shift are already showing, with Chinese factories already reporting a shortage of labour. But we haven’t seen anything yet. The workforce is in free fall. Back in the mid-Eighties, four or five people entered it for everyone who reached retirement age, but the two groups are now roughly equal. Rust-belt cities are losing their life. Regions like Dongbei, once the beating heart of Maoist industrialisation, are now shadows of their former selves. The ballooning number of elderly rely on thinly-stretched single children to look after them — offspring of the One-Child Policy who have no siblings with whom to share the burden. One typical young adult, trying to juggle caring for her parents and working full-time (so that she can pay their medical bills), laments: “It’s a real struggle. Sometimes I just want to quit my job, but now I need the money more than ever.” In just a few decades, there will likely be two people in their early sixties for every person in their early twenties.

The median citizen of the People’s Republic is already in his or her late thirties — similar to the median American and only slightly younger than the median Brit. But while America and the UK will age only moderately, in a generation or two the average Chinese person will be pushing 50. An ageing China might be relatively peaceable and crime-free, but it will lack the dynamism which has vaulted the country up the economic and political ranks over the past 40 years. The crisis is bad enough for Xi Jingping to have vowed to implement policies to boost the birth rate, in an effort to reverse national ageing.

China is the world’s great population behemoth: what happens to the nation’s demography has significant ramifications for the rest of the world. As Charles Goodhart and Manoj Pradhan pointed out in their book, The Great Demographic Reversal, the tremendous flow of subsistence peasants into the factories of China’s coastal plain not only fuelled the country’s stratospheric economic growth but also provided the developed world with a vast pool of cheap labour. Manufacturing transitioned out of Europe and North America to the PRC, where there was an endless supply of cheap labour. Now this era has ended. As this vast labour reservoir dries up, expect to pay more for everything from toys to tablets.

What can be done? Wealthy Western countries can choose to plug a shortage of workers with immigration, but this is not an option for China — for three reasons. First, as a middle-income country it is relatively unattractive to those seeking brighter lights and pavements paved, if not with gold, then at least with tarmac. Second, China is geographically and culturally distant from the parts of the world whose population is still booming, namely sub-Saharan Africa, where French and English are widely spoken, and Paris and London are easier to reach. And third, whereas a country like the UK can meaningfully top up its population with immigrants to ameliorate pinch-points in the labour market, China, with a population more than 20 times ours, would have to hoover up hundreds of millions to make much of a difference.

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China’s demographic decline will impact geopolitics as well as world economics. True, the nation will still have plenty of young men to fill its army’s ranks, but as it ages its politicians may be less inclined to lose them. Parents who have been forced by the Party to have only one child — and who have traditionally valued sons above daughters — will be doubly reluctant to lose them. In Russia in the Eighties, mothers received coffins containing the bodies of their sons who had died in Afghanistan; their protests have been evoked in the nation’s most recent war. Although worries about maternal discontent were not enough to stop Putin invading Ukraine, the precedent may give Xi Jinping pause for thought before he sets out on any military adventures.

And more significantly, there is a country jostling to fill the void that China will leave at the top of the world’s population ranks — a country that has not, historically, been the PRC’s friend. The global balance of power will of course be shifted by the fact that, for the first time in thousands of years, China is about to be eclipsed as the world’s most populous nation by India. India has a very long way to go before its economy catches up with China, but its demography means that it is almost certain to be the faster growing of the two economies over the next 20 years or so.

India has not suffered such absurd policies as China; when vasectomies were forced on men in the Seventies, there was a furious backlash and the policy was dropped. Though the Indian government has long encouraged smaller families — “Ham Do Hamara Do” (“We Two and Our Two”) was the slogan of the day when I first visited in the Eighties — population control has been more persuasive than coercive. Development has also been slower: less urbanisation, less education, less prosperity. It is no surprise, therefore, that India’s fertility rate has been coming down more slowly than China’s.

But it has been coming down nonetheless, from about six children per woman in the mid-Sixties, to just over two today. Still, the population can sustain itself — and besides, India has years of “demographic momentum” ahead of it: the population will continue to grow simply by dint of the large number of young people starting families, even if those families are fairly small, compared to the small number of older people dying. India can look forward to a couple of decades in which it can reap the so-called demographic dividend, with plenty of young people entering the workforce, relatively few leaving it, and the new workers not burdened by a surfeit of children. These are the circumstances which coincided with fantastic economic booms in places like Korea, in the Seventies, and Indonesia, in more recent times.

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Scratch beneath the surface of the national data in India, however, and all is not well. Fertility is still high in the north’s poor Hindi belt, in places such as Uttar Pradesh (which has a population three times that of Britain’s) and Bihar. In those Indian states where the economy is flourishing, however, like Gujarat and Tamil Nadu, the average woman has a similar number of children to women in the UK. In West Bengal, fertility is closer to the level of Japan. As India plunges headlong into greater prosperity, it is rapidly losing its demographic edge. Indeed, India’s demographic crisis, though a few decades behind China’s, appears to be just as extreme; the first whiff of escaping dire poverty and birth rate seems to collapse. It looks as if India, for reasons that are hard to pin down, having reached replacement level fertility, is going to swiftly plunge below it. Countries such as Indonesia and Sri Lanka, by contrast, have managed to hold steady at around two children per woman for decades. India too will be ageing and waning before long.

Beyond individual nations, if our species is to continue thriving, it must find a way to combine modernity with a pro-natal attitude. And on this front, there’s only so much a government can do. China may be famous for its controversial demographic policy, but the only way to really shape a population’s size is a cultural, rather than a political, shift — a change in attitude such as that witnessed in Georgia when its leading cleric called on its people to procreate. As China’s population starts to decline, and India’s looks set to follow, the question for the whole of humanity is: who, in the long run, is going to be keeping the lights on?

Instead, it was extreme privilege that defined royals back then. Today a very large part of the public can afford fancy dining, expensive hotels, and foreign travel — at least from time to time — and most can expect to retire to a comfortable bed in a pleasantly ambient temperature. But not so long ago these were the prerogatives of only a small share of the population, at the top of which sat royalty.

Yet despite their elite lifestyles, monarchs and their consorts can tell us a surprising amount about how life in Britain has changed over the past 300 years, and in no department more than that of demography. In fact, the whole demographic story of Britain since the early 18th century can be told through the reproductive history of four queens.

Let’s start with Queen Anne who came to the throne in 1702. Her sister Mary had died childless in her early thirties — a death immortalised by the funeral music of Henry Purcell, who followed her to the graveyard within less than a year. Mary’s husband William III — first cousin of Mary and Anne as well as Mary’s fellow monarch — died some years later in his early fifties with no heir, so the throne passed to Anne. By the time Anne died, just short of 50 years of age, she had apparently had 18 pregnancies, and although one of her offspring did make it past infancy, he did not survive his mother. And so, with Anne’s Catholic half-brother excluded for religious reasons, the call went out to distant — Protestant — relations in Hanover.

The reason that Anne’s reproductive failures are of interest is that they stand as an extreme but not atypical example of the sad human condition for most of history, during which not even royalty could shield an individual from the cruelty of nature. This was the unchanging world which the Reverend Thomas Malthus described a century later, in which humans bred like rabbits and died like flies. Populations pressed forwards like Europe’s in the Middle Ages, only to be pushed back by plague or war. Ultimately humans stretched the limits of the planet’s carrying capacity at a time when crop yields were still very meagre and hunger never far off for most of the population.

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But the world which Malthus described as eternal was coming to an end. Already in Malthus’s day, death rates were plunging, life expectancies extending and the population growing rapidly. A few years after his death the young Victoria came to the throne: her reign would redefine population patterns in the British Isles and set a precedent which was to spread well beyond it. Victoria had nine children and each of them outlived her, even though she managed to live a good three decades longer than Anne. Again, this is exemplary of trends at the time but a rather extreme example; infant mortality remained very high and only began falling towards the end of Victoria’s reign. To be survived by nine out of nine children was indeed a feat, but far less miraculously atypical than it would have been a century or two earlier.

Britain’s population explosion under Queen Victoria was one of the most significant events of the 19th century. As well as providing a ready labour force to transform the country into the workshop of the world, it supplied a huge excess population that settled in colonies from Vancouver to Tasmania. The Anglosphere as we know it today could not have come into existence without the millions who left the British Isles and settled new lands, creating Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. And until the latter years of the 19th century — when other European countries started to follow suit and export their surplus citizens — the people of the United Kingdom provided the bulk of the inflow that turned the United States from a handful of colonies hugging the Atlantic in 1800 to the behemoth it was becoming a century later.

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Just as Queen Anne and Queen Victoria represented the demography of their ages, so too did Elizabeth the Queen Mother. A Scottish aristocrat and one of ten, she married the future George VI, one of six. But, typical of a generation which came to reproductive maturity in the inter-war years, Elizabeth and her husband did not follow in the fertile footsteps of their parents but limited their progeny to two. Already before the First World War family sizes were shrinking, with a fertility rate in 1914 in the UK of about three children per woman. By 1939, it was down to two. This was the next phase in what we now call the demographic transition, a change which happened first in the UK then spread to the rest of Europe and to North America and in more recent decades to the rest of the world. After a period of falling death rates, a more urban and educated population produces fewer children, as they have more hope of their survival.

But demography would not be so interesting if it did not have twists and kinks. The Princess Elizabeth, our present Queen, defied the demographic trend of low birth rates and small families by marrying younger than her mother and having twice as many children. And again, she was typical of her generation. After the Second World War there was a perhaps inevitable baby boom as the men returned home and a certain amount of catching up took place in terms of family formation. But with some ups and down, the baby boom went on for the best part of two decades, creating the baby boomers of whom those of us born in 1964 (including Prince Edward) represent a final hurrah.

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After Elizabeth II’s final child was born, the country’s fertility rate again began to tumble. Each of her children has produced just two, representative of the country as a whole. And although the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge have bucked the national trend by having three, Meghan and Harry certainly represent a large swathe of their generation by not only stopping at two but making an environmental virtue of the fact.

Perhaps it is surprising that so much of our demographic history can be seen through the lives of four women who were so exceptional in terms of their social status. But maybe we should not be shocked that, as well as being heirs to the throne, each royal generation also exists in its own time, influencing and being influenced by the wider trends around them.

So far, so inoffensive. And yet over the past month, the Code, which is now the binding authority over all civil disputes in China, has become the subject of fierce internal criticism. Its origin? China’s increasingly outspoken new generation of feminists, who are furious at its introduction of a one-month “cooling-off period” before a divorce is finalised.

During that time, a husband and wife now have the power to revoke a divorce application without the other’s consent. That may seem like a mere technicality, but for China’s feminists it represents an infringement on women’s freedom to divorce, as well puts the victims of domestic violence in a potentially dangerous situation. They are also concerned that the ultimate purpose of the “cooling-off period” is to remedy China’s decreasing birth rates by keeping marriages afloat. In essence, they argue, it treats women as resources instead of rights-bearing individuals.

Since it was first mooted last year, Chinese feminists have launched a number of anonymous online social media campaigns against the move. And while they would seem to have failed, they have certainly succeeded in making their presence felt. Whether China’s ruling Communist Party (CCP) likes it or not, over the past year the country’s nascent feminist movement has become a force to be reckoned with.

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Indeed, Beijing was so rattled by this new feminist opposition that in recent months it has felt compelled to call in in legal experts to cite foreign precedents to the “cooling-off period”, as well as to emphasise that in extraordinary circumstances such as domestic violence, either side of a marriage can file a divorce lawsuit. Suffice it to say that these explanations did not convince China’s feminists, who pointed out that divorce is not easily granted by Chinese civil courts — not to mention that disadvantaged women may not be able to afford the lawsuits.

And so, last October, President Xi decided to take matters into his own hands — and in doing so, inadvertently assured China’s feminist movement a place in the history books. “Gender equality is China’s basic national policy,” he said in a speech to the nation. “Women are the pioneers of human civilisation and the promoters of social progress, and they have written extraordinary achievements in all walks of life.” Although he did not directly comment on the “cooling-off periods”, a clear attempt was made to placate China’s feminists; Xi identified gender equality as a principle in China’s post-pandemic recovery plan, and promised that the government will provide concrete help to females affected by the Covid-19 pandemic.

Xi’s response, as well as the recent opposition to his new Code, raise two important questions: just who are China’s feminists? And how did they become such a powerful force?

The typical Chinese feminist is, to put it simply, the embodiment of a new progressive activism which is often — and some might say paradoxically — rooted in support for the CCP and its scepticism towards capitalism. To make a direct comparison with today’s Western feminist movement is, to say the least, a frustrating, near-impossible task. China’s feminists are, after all, the product of not just a different culture, but an entirely different political system.

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What both movements do share, however, is youth. According to sociological research, Chinese feminists are predominantly born after the 1980s. It’s telling that this coincides with the country’s one-child policy, which was a binding rule in China between 1980 and 2016. Without having to compete with any brothers, these young women were usually well-educated and privileged. In terms of where they live, my own research has found that 57% of the feminist advocates on Chinese social media are from major economic centres in China. This partly explains why they tend to hold conscious or unconscious contempt for men from poorer regions — though this is partly a result of the boy-favouring traditions in those places. In the eyes of young feminists, such traditions are backwards, and often lead to the cruel treatment of women and girls.

As one might expect, it is the habits and interests of Chinese feminists which sets them most apart from their Western counterparts. Brought up in a culture that places an extraordinary amount of existential capital on the internet, they are huge fans of online shopping and are the driving force behind China’s $670 billion ‘sheconomy’. They also spend a lot of time cultivating a robust digital presence — in particular by browsing online forums dedicated to TV shows, films and ACG (anime, cartoon and games) fandoms. More recently, their craze for yaoi — female-oriented anime with a focus on fantasy erotic relationships between men — has made them natural allies of China’s LGBT community.

But don’t fall into the trap of thinking that China’s feminists content themselves with passing their time on online frivolities. When feeling threatened or attacked, the young feminists can quickly turn into a highly organised force. In this sense, at least, today’s well-educated, liberal-minded feminists draw inspiration from activists in the West, such as Emma Watson. And they are not afraid of challenging the CCP’s policies. In fact, the recent battle over “cooling-off periods” represents just one area in which they are starting to campaign.

Only last year, China’s feminists led a protest campaign against the disturbing rise of media monopolies in the country. It all started on February 27, when the fans of Xiao Zhan, a poplar Chinese actor and singer, reported the global fanfiction sharing website Archives of Our Own (AO3) to the Communist Party because one of its stories portrayed him as a cross-dressing sex worker who falls in love with a teenage boy. Xiao’s fans felt that the fictional portrayal tarnished their idol’s image and complained to the Chinese authorities about AO3 “showing pornographic content to underage audience” and “promoting child pornography”. The Chinese government responded by blocking access to the foreign site, as well as several other Chinese fanfiction hubs.

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Concerned that this violated authors’ freedom and constituted an attack on China’s LGBT community, China’s young feminists quickly mobilised. Together with other subculture groups, they launched a series of campaigns on Weibo — only to find that their posts were being suppressed: even though one thread had 700 million hits, it was somehow excluded from Weibo’s “trending stories” list. Meanwhile, supportive messages for Xiao topped the list almost every day.

Believing that Weibo was kowtowing to Xiao’s management company, feminist campaigners urged the Party to control media monopolies and impose stronger regulation on China’s wild “idol economy”. After facing a barrage of online protests, the Chinese government finally stepped in, and fined Weibo for “manipulating the display of information”. Its “trending stories” list was also taken down for a week as punishment.

No doubt China’s feminists chalked it down as a step in the right direction, although the CCP is yet to heed their calls to bring back AO3. What is particularly interesting about this emerging movement, though, is its symbiotic relationship with China’s ruling party: it both puts pressure on the CCP to enact change, while also embodying many of its values.

Take the feminists’ recent campaign against commercial surrogacy, for example, which is inextricably linked to the CCP’s antipathy towards capitalism. Commercial surrogacy is prohibited in China, though wealthy would-be mothers tend to get round this by travelling to the West to find a surrogate. Only last month, Chinese actress Zheng Shuang was effectively “cancelled” by the feminist movement after it was reported that she’d had two surrogate children through overseas services, whom she later abandoned. But while her treatment of her children was, of course, a source of criticism, it was the method of their conception which attracted the most ire.

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For while some members of the LGBT community support surrogacy — largely because they cannot conceive naturally— China’s feminists refuse to stand with them. One post by an anonymous user on social media platform Zhihu summarised their concerns: “Let’s use some imagination. What will happen if surrogacy becomes legal in China? The giant e-commerce companies will lead the price war. They will try to attract customers by promising the best surrogate mothers and the desired gender of babies. What do you think they will do to keep the promises? Don’t think I’m talking nonsense. Capital will trample on all human laws for profit.”

It was a comment typical of today’s generation of feminists in China: in many ways, despite feeling empowered by consumerism, much of their ideology is also rooted in the CCP’s political project. No doubt that will sit uneasily with a number of Western feminists. But just as Western women are a product of their culture, so too is the case with Chinese feminists. And while their priorities are certainly rooted in a different world, it is increasingly becoming clear that they do have the power to change it.