In 1979, they imposed a one-child policy on their citizens. It was brutally implemented. There were forced sterilisations, forced abortions and crippling financial penalties on families with unauthorised children. In some areas, family planning officials — effectively a secret police force — punished non-complying parents by demolishing homes and kidnapping excess children.

It was all for nothing. The long-term population trends would have been similar without Beijing’s campaign of anti-natal terror. Birth rates across East Asia have plummeted, despite the fact that only China had a one-child policy. 

Furthermore, Chinese birth rates have stayed low despite the end of the policy. Worryingly low, in fact. In recent years, the Government hasn’t just eased up on population control, but now wants families to have more children. There was the shift to a two-child policy in 2015 and, earlier this year, to a three-child policy. 

But the biggest sign of panic came this week, when the State Council announced a ban on abortions for non-medical purposes. It was the clearest proof yet that China is hurtling towards a demographic disaster that the Government is desperate to stop.

We can tell that they’re worried because the official figures are so misleading. This is what usually happens when a communist regime has something it wants to hide: whether it’s a poor harvest, inadequate production or mass murder.

Based on government statistics, the World Bank puts the Chinese total fertility rate (TFR) — the average number of children born to each woman over her lifetime — at 1.7. The rate required to maintain population stability is 2 (plus a bit more to compensate for child mortality).

So a TFR of 1.7 is well below the “replacement rate”. However, according to demographers like Lyman Stone, China’s real fertility rate is probably much lower — perhaps as low as 1.1. This matters, because the mathematics of demographics are merciless. 

To see how important these numbers are, think about a sequence of three generations. If the TFR falls below replacement, then each new generation will be smaller than its predecessor. For instance, a constant TFR of 1.7 means that your children’s generation will be only 85% as big as your own, and your grandkid’s generation 72%. That’s a significant decline, but manageable. 

Now try a TFR of 1.4 — this brings down the generation size to 70% of the starting point within just one generation and to less than 50% within two generations. We’re talking about proper depopulation here: schools closing down; businesses struggling to find workers; villages and towns inhabited by no one but the elderly — and, in time, only by ghosts. 

It’s already happening in some places. The village of Nagoro in Japan is famous not because its population decline is unique (sadly, it isn’t), but because its departed residents have been replaced by life-sized dolls. Created by Tsukimi Ayano, the effigies work in fields, wait at bus stops and fill the classroom of a school that closed a decade ago. Whether one finds the display poignant or eerie, it’s a haunting reminder of what’s happening right now in left-behind communities across the developed world — and what might happen to the rest of us in the decades ahead.

At a TFR of close to 1 — the goal of the one-child policy — we enter into the realm of country-wide demographic collapse. Each generation is roughly half the size of its predecessor. Over several generations, a nation basically disappears. If you want to know what that future would be like, don’t read Nineteen Eighty-Four or Brave New World, but P.D. James’s The Children of Men.  

And this is a prospect that is already hitting some countries. According to the latest figures, the TFR in Singapore is 1.14, in Hong Kong it is 1.07 and in South Korea a terrifying 0.86. North Korea doesn’t have to nuke its southern rival — just wait for it to empty out. 

If China’s real TFR is in this ballpark, then the apparent panic of its government is no surprise. Xi, after all, will be well aware of what happened to Japan thirty years ago. In the 1980s, the Land of the Rising Sun was where China is now — the emerging economic superpower and number one threat to America’s pre-eminence. Back then, Japan was at the cutting edge of modernity — a neon-lit vision of the future that the West could only aspire to. 

The buzz — or, more accurately, the hype — was reflected in Japanese share and property prices. By 1989, the Japanese stock market accounted for over 40% of all the stock market values in the world. The country’s real estate was worth more than all the land in the US (despite America being 26 times bigger). 

Then there was the most mind-blowing statistic of them all. The Imperial Palace in Tokyo sits on a plot less than one square mile in area. Yet, at the peak of the property bubble, the grounds were valued at more than the entire US state of California. 

Of course, it couldn’t last — and it didn’t. In the early 1990s, land and share values collapsed, plunging Japan into its “Lost Decade” (more like two or three decades) of economic stagnation. 

It’s significant that the peak of the bubble — 1989 — coincided with the “1.57 shock“. This wasn’t an earthquake, at least not literally, but the news that Japan’s total fertility rate had declined to a record low of 1.57. By today’s standards, that’s really not that low; but at the time it caused national dismay. Might it also have contributed to the bursting of Japan’s economic bubble?

The decision to have children is an expression of faith in the future. Without that faith — and certainly without a rising generation of producers and consumers — it’s hard for a country to sustain a rapid rate of economic growth. It’s even harder to sustain a bubble economy, especially one based on a property boom. What is the point of building all those new homes if there aren’t enough people to live in them? Sooner or later, investors look beyond the hype and ask the obvious question.

It’s the question that Xi Jinping will be fretting about right now. The immediate worry is Evergrande, China’s second biggest property developer, which is teetering on the edge of collapse. But it’s not just one company in peril, but the entire economy. Over the last decade, Chinese property prices have doubled. The country is building five times as many new homes each year as in Europe and America combined. And despite China’s prowess in manufacturing, the real estate sector now accounts for more than a quarter of the country’s GDP. The whole thing is built on a mountain of debt — including the $300 billion borrowed by Evergrande. 

Xi will be pulling on every lever to stabilise the situation, but what he really needs is for his people to go forth and multiply — and fill all those empty homes. 

Can he persuade them to do so? Other countries, including Japan, have tried to reverse declining birth rates — offering parents tax breaks, benefits and other forms of support. But, at best, these pro-natal inducements have had limited success.   

Of course, Japan is a democracy. China is not. Where he sees fit, Xi Jinping has no trouble interfering in the private lives of his citizens. His party once compelled Chinese families to have fewer children, so might it now compel them to have more? In place of forced sterilisation, could we see the state pursue a policy of forced fertilisation? 

If its survival depended upon it, this is a regime that would bring back its two-child policy — only this time as a minimum. 

This ethno-religious transformation of the island occurred under the shadow of semi-history, allowing for the development of an imaginative romantic tradition exemplified by the Arthurian Cycle. But this Dark Age also became a bone of contention between the English who saw themselves as deeply rooted in the land, and those who declared that they were a German folk who had won their new home through conquest and blood. The dominant view at any given time reflected social and political events of the 20th century more than facts. The propaganda value of myth meant more than the conjectures of scholars.

While in the early 20th century the dominant position was that the English were a people akin to German Saxons, a race apart from the Welsh, by the early 21st century serious scholars assumed that the spread of Anglo-Saxon culture occurred through imitation rather than replacement.

Today we can say with some confidence that neither stark view is correct, and that the middle path between is far more interesting and complex. Large numbers of Saxons, Angles and Jutes did in fact cross the North Sea — but the preponderance of England’s heritage still draws from the Celtic-speaking peoples. It is not coincidence that the earliest rulers in Alfred the Great’s lineage bear Celtic names, not German ones.

Those who argued for the erasure of the Celtic people did not do so without any basis. St. Gildas, a 6th century British Celt, recounted in On the Ruin and Conquest of Britain the defeat and destruction of his people at the hands of the Saxons. More recently, 19th century philologists observed that the number of Brythonic Celtic loan words in English is extremely small; in fact, there may be more Celtic loan words from Gaulish, due to the later Norman French influence. Finally, the collapse of institutions like the Roman Christian Church and the total decay of urban life indicates incredible disruption of the social hierarchy which characterised post-Roman Britain.

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A contrast here exists with Gaul, which absorbed a German-speaking elite but retained Roman language and religion. Some of the nobility of southern and western France even traced their descent from Romans, not Germans. On a more demotic level, British archaeologists have also observed that the arrival of the Saxons seems to have been associated with a transformation of the layout of rural farmsteads. In most societies, farmers have customs and traditions which they hew to, and they are often quite stubborn and set in their ways. Such a change indicates new people, not just practices.

But by the late 20th century such views of cultural and demographic disruption were in bad odour. The dominant ethos is that people did not move, their customs and traditions did. Hengist and Horsa may have existed, but rather than a folk migration the Anglo-Saxon conquest was one of a small number of German mercenaries who were engaged in elite capture of the post-Roman peasantry.

The Welsh historian Norman Davies observed in his 1999 book The Isles that “blood price” in 8th century Wessex differed between whether one was Saxon or British, the implication here being that there were many Celtic Britons living in the Anglo-Saxon lands, even if our documentary evidence is from the Saxon elite; this would tally with the 6th century ancestors of Alfred the Great having names such as Ceawlin, Cynegils and Cerdic, all of which have a distinctive Welsh flavor.

Genetics has untangled the Gordian knot of this semi-historical mystery, although illumination has not come at once, and only in fits and starts. One of the primary reasons is that the genetic difference between “Celtic” and “German” peoples is very small. Most Northern Europeans separated from each other very recently. Ancient DNA from between three and eight thousand years ago shows that Northern Europe underwent several mass migrations which transformed the genetic landscape.

First, the blue-eyed dark-skinned hunter-gatherers who descend from Ice Age Europeans disappeared and were absorbed by brown-eyed pale-skinned farmers who moved north out of the Near East. Then, these agriculturists were themselves overwhelmed by a people who migrated out of the Eurasian steppe into Europe 5,000 years ago. These pastoralist people probably brought Indo-European languages, and 4,500 years ago they arrived in Britain as the Bell Beaker culture. Within a few generations there was 90% genetic turnover, as the farmers who first erected Stonehenge disappeared, and were replaced by people who seem to have arrived from what is today northern Germany, possibly prefiguring the later Anglo-Saxon migration.

The problem from the perspective of genetics in understanding the proportion of Anglo-Saxon ancestry in the modern English goes back to the reality that Germans and Celts themselves had only been separated for 3,000 years, at most. These are genetically very close populations, and the technology of the early 21st century could not resolve the questions being asked.

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UCL geneticist Steve Jones did attempt such a thing in his 2003 book Y: The Descent of Men. Jones observed that the distribution of two Y chromosomal lineages exhibits a sharp break at Offa’s Dyke. A far higher proportion of Welsh men are R1b, which is very common across the Atlantic facade of Europe, while more English men carry R1a, which is found in higher frequencies in Germany and Norway. In contrast, Professor Jones observed that there was no difference in the maternal heritage of the Welsh and English, suggesting that the ethnic change was due to the impact of men. Jones’s UCL colleague Mark Thomas later developed an “apartheid model” to explain why the genetic difference between the English and Welsh was so striking.

But the true understanding of the situation could only be obtained by looking across the whole genome, not simply the paternal and maternal lineages. This was done by the Peopling of the British Isles Project, which published a paper in 2015 that drew from analysis on hundreds of thousands of genetic markers from 2,000 British individuals who were sampled from all across the United Kingdom.

They estimated that 10-40% of the ancestry in central and southern England was Anglo-Saxon — that is, DNA segments more similar to the Germans than the Welsh. Another paper from 2016, utilising ancient as well as contemporary DNA, estimated that 38% of the ancestry in the “East English” — people from East Anglia and the East Midlands — is derived from the Anglo-Saxons. These researchers actually found DNA from Dark Age-era graves identified as Anglo-Saxon, and some of these individuals were far more like the Germans in their DNA than the modern English; they differed from earlier Iron Age samples, proving beyond a doubt that a significant number of Germans did cross the North Sea in the 6th century.

Where does this leave us in relation to the question of whether the transformation of Dark Age Britain to early medieval England was one of genes or memes? The clear answer seems to be both. The emergence of a new style of farming, pottery and the collapse of urban Roman civilization and Christianity in eastern Britain was not simply due to the prestige and power of a small number of German warlords. Whole villages must have transplanted themselves across the North Sea, creating the nucleus of a new people, and absorbed the remaining British Celts. The lack of Celtic loanwords and the adoption of Saxon peasant culture may indicate the self-confidence of the newcomers. If St. Gildas is correct, the British elites moved to the west of the island, leaving the common people to their own devices.

But though the southern and eastern fringe of England has a substantial Anglo-Saxon demographic imprint, that fades out as one moves to the west, including to the lands that once comprised the kingdom of Wessex. There is far less German genetic influence in Hampshire, Berkshire or Wiltshire, let alone Devon. We know from early medieval records that Celtic language speakers did exist as late as the 8th century in these domains (and much later in Devon) but by then Old English, which is for all purposes a purely Germanic language, was dominant.

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The genealogy of the House of Wessex may offer a clue as to what occurred in broad swaths of western England. In the 6th century Celtic names imply that this elite lineage was identified with British culture, and looked west, but by the 7th German names became common, and the kings were pagan. Though the Saxons may have imposed their way of life through sheer numbers in the east, explaining the light impact of British Celtic culture upon their folkways and language, their expansion beyond the Saxon Shore seems to have been due to the adoption of the German identity by native British. The killing of a Celtic-speaking individual under the Saxon system of blood price was far cheaper than for a German speaker, serving as a clear inducement to assimilate.

What science makes clear then is that both extreme scenarios presented in the 19th and 20th centuries were wrong. The English are not a race apart from the Welsh. The modern English are genetically closest to the Celtic peoples of the British Isles, but the modern English are not simply Celts who speak a German language. A large number of Germans migrated to Britain in the 6th century, and there are parts of England where nearly half the ancestry is Germanic.

These folk served as the focus of a cultural revolution that transformed the British Isles. It was not a passive affair: the cities, churches, and hamlets of the previous inhabitants were blotted out, and what had been one of the provinces of the Roman Empire became a backwater pagan land. Though the original Romano-British elites had some knowledge of Latin, and patronised the Christian Church, the patina of civilization was clearly thin upon them, and the loosely Christian Celtic warlords of Dark Age western Britain transformed seamlessly into the pagan kings of Anglo-Saxon England.

The initial founding of the Saxon Shore was surely based on a level of brutality that Christian priests, if any had lived to tell the tale, would have recorded with foreboding. But the transformation of vast swaths of western Britain into the core of what had become England by the Viking Age occurred consensually, so seductive had the Saxon society become to the Celts, highborn and low.

The lesson that history and genetics teach us that cultural change is a complex phenomenon, and a single factor does not explain the whole story. Today we live in an age of migration, and native peoples fear being replaced, while immigrant communities fear being assimilated. Numbers matter, but the Saxons tell us that numbers are not everything.