China’s population shrinks again as policies fail to reverse decline
For the fourth year in a row, the country reports more deaths than births in 2025 as its birth rate plunges to a record low
[BEIJING] Declaring childbirth a patriotic act. Nagging newlyweds about family planning. Taxing condoms.
To get its citizens to have babies, the Chinese Communist Party has pulled every lever.
The efforts have largely failed. For the fourth year in a row, China reported more deaths than births in 2025 as its birth rate plunged to a record low, leaving its population smaller and older.
The government on Monday (Jan 19) said that 7.92 million babies were born last year, down from 9.54 million in 2024. The number of people who died in 2025, 11.31 million, continued to climb. The latest population figures were reported alongside economic data that showed China’s economy grew 5 per cent in 2025.
The number of births for every 1,000 people fell to 5.63, the lowest level on record since the founding of the People’s Republic of China, according to official government data.
Around the world, governments are contending with falling birth rates. But the problem is more acute for China: Fewer babies mean fewer future workers to support a rapidly growing cohort of retirees. A worsening economy has made addressing the challenge even more difficult.
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“China is facing a severe challenge posed by an extremely low fertility rate,” said Wu Fan, a professor of family policy at Nankai University in eastern China.
The country’s top leaders have redoubled their efforts to try to boost the national birth rate enough to reverse the decline, something that demographers have said is probably impossible now that China has crossed a demographic threshold where its fertility rate, a measure of the number of children a woman has over a lifetime, is so low that its population is shrinking.
Xi Jinping, China’s top leader, has called for a “new type of marriage and childbearing culture”, entreating officials to influence young people’s views on “love and marriage, fertility and family”.
Local officials have responded with increasingly ham-handed measures to get citizens to have babies, including tracking women’s menstrual cycles and issuing guidelines to reduce abortions that are medically unnecessary.
Many of the measures have been met with a collective shrug by young people who do not want to start a family.
On Jan 1, officials placed a 13 per cent value-added tax on contraceptive drugs and condoms, a move that has been met with a mix of indifference, mockery and derision.
While that policy was not explicitly directed at boosting the birth rate, it was immediately interpreted by a sceptical public as yet another futile attempt to encourage more children.
Jonathan Zhu, 28, said that the price increase would have little effect on his habits. “I’ll still use them,” he said, citing financial pressure as his reason for delaying fatherhood until marriage.
His girlfriend, Hu Tingyan, 26, agreed, noting that the cost of condoms does not influence her willingness to have children. “I don’t feel the time is right yet,” she noted.
Some of the government’s other baby-boosting measures, such as offering cash and subsidised housing for couples, have also failed to move the needle.
“The empirical evidence from other countries so far is that monetary incentives have almost no effect in raising fertility,” said Wang Feng, a professor of sociology at the University of California, Irvine.
For many young people, the high costs of raising a child are especially discouraging amid a slowing economy and a property crisis. In addition, youth unemployment remains high, and many recent college graduates are struggling to land a steady pay cheque, falling back on their parents with little support from a threadbare social welfare system.
“With China’s economic woes, young people may want to wait and see, and that’s not good news for raising fertility,” Prof Wang noted.
China arrived at this problem much sooner than it anticipated it would even a decade ago, when officials relaxed the one-child policy to permit couples to have two children. (It adjusted its birth policy again to allow three babies in 2021.) This has left the government with less time to fix its severely underfunded pension and healthcare systems.
At the same time, China has experienced a sudden and rapid decline in the working-age population, as the number of citizens age 60 and over is projected to reach 400 million by 2035. Young people often express reluctance to contribute to the public pension fund because of the financial burden.
A low retirement age has complicated things. The government raised it last year for the first time since the 1950s and plans to gradually increase the official age by 2040 to 63 for men, 58 for women in office jobs and 55 for women in factories. However, it remains among the lowest in the world.
More recently, some party officials have even offered cash rewards to successful matchmakers, hoping to spur a baby boom by getting more people to marry. NYTIMES
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