UPDATES
- January 2026: For the fourth year in a row, China reported more deaths than births in 2025 as its birthrate plunged to a record low, leaving its population smaller and older. The government said 7.92 million babies were born in 2025, down from 9.54 million in 2024. The number of people who died in 2025, 11.31 million, continued to climb. 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. “If China could somehow sustain 7.92 million births per year from now on, its population would eventually stabilize at roughly 625 million, far below today’s 1.405 billion,” Jesús Fernández-Villaverde, a Professor of Economics at the University of Pennsylvania, posted on X. “In reality, as smaller cohorts reach childbearing age, births will fall well below 7.92 million. Hence, 625 million is a very generous upper bound, even under implausibly optimistic assumptions about life expectancy. Put differently, there were fewer births in China in 2025 than in 1776, the year the United States declared independence.”
- July 2024 : A United Nations forecast published shows how quickly China is aging, a demographic crunch that the U.N. predicts will cut China’s population by more than half by the end of the century. Wall Street Journal, July 11, 2024. With the number of babies in free fall—fewer than 10 million were born in 2022, compared with around 16 million in 2012—China is headed toward a demographic collapse. China’s population, now around 1.4 billion, is likely to drop to just around half a billion by 2100, according to some projections. Wall Street Journal, Jan. 2, 2024.
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America is fixated on the threat of China as an emerging world power. But we ignore the fact that China’s long-term prognosis is not good.
Data released today revealed that China’s population has begun to shrink after a long decline in its birthrate that will likely continue. For the first time since 1961, China’s population actually shrank last year, by 850,000, to 1.412 billion. “The trend, coupled with an increase in life expectancy, has hastened a worrying event: The day when the country will not have enough people of working age to fuel a growing economy,” the New York Times reported.
There’s no question that China has achieved unprecedented economic success, but decisions on population growth made in the 1970s are coming back to haunt the country. That was when the government set a goal of limiting most families to one child in order to deal with huge and rapidly growing population.
The policy was formalized on September 25, 1980 in a public letter published by the Central Committee of the Chinese Community Party, calling upon all families in China to adhere to the one-child policy.
But however well intended, the policy has had significant unintended consequences that will burden China for years to come and threaten its political and economic power: too sharp a drop in birth rates and too many old people.
In 1979, Liang Zhongtang, a Chinese economist and demographer, insisted that the one-child policy would be a “terrible tragedy” that would turn China into a “breathless, lifeless society without a future,” but he was ignored.
The rigorous enforcement of the policy quickly got ugly, with a particularly devastating impact on female babies, as families favored having male children.
NPR reported on the consequences of the one-child policy in China’s Rudong County in Jiangsu province.
The county launched a family planning pilot program in the 1960s. “Having a second child wasn’t allowed, so we had to work on (pregnant women) and persuade them to have an abortion,” Chen Jieru, the Communist Party secretary of a village at the time, told NPR.
The result? The policy, in combination with an exodus of young people to cities for better opportunities, left the county’s young population shriveled while the elderly population has exploded.
The increasing number of the elderly is soon going to be a problem across China. There are now five workers to each retiree, but in a little more than 20 years that is projected to shift to 1.6 workers to every one retiree. “It spells shrunken tax coffers, reduced consumer spending and all-around diminished productivity,” said Mei Fong in her recently issued book, “One Child – the story of China’s most radical experiment.”
A senior Chinese economist, Liu Mingkang, speaking at the Asia Global Dialogue in 2012, said China’s population growth will end as soon as 2020 when its population will peak at 1.6 billion.
Youhua Chen, a demographer at China’s Nanjing University, gained some notoriety by warning about a sharp drop ahead for China’s population. The decline will be accompanied by soaring health care and pension costs, and collapsing real estate markets, he warned.
Prof. Chen has predicted that China’s population will peak at about 1.4 billion and then fall precipitously to 500 million. His graph is below.
Title: Figure 1 Estimated China Population Growth 1950-2100 (Black line): Low (Plan, Program, Prospects…) (Pink line): Medium (Plan, Program, Prospects…) (Blue line): High (Plan, Program, Prospects) Graph courtesy of Mei Fong, Fellow, New America
If Prof. Chen is right, this means lots of problems.
“These problems will compromise economic development, strain social harmony, and place the traditional Chinese family structure under severe pressure; in fact, they could shake Chinese civilization to its very foundations,” said Nicholas Eberstadt, Henry Wendt Scholar in Political Economy with the American Enterprise Institute.
China has recently loosened the one-child restrictions, but it hasn’t resulted in a baby boom. So the prediction still holds that in the near future India may overtake China as the world’s most populous state, and India, which some are already calling an emerging superpower, will keep growing while China declines.
According to RAND, a research organization that develops solutions to public policy challenges , the Chinese government has implemented a range of pro-natalist policies aimed at reversing fertility decline, including the universal two-child policy in 2015 and the three-child policy in 2021, yet these policy measures have not corrected China’s plummeting total fertility rate or birth rate. A 2025 RAND report, Pronatalist Pivot: Assessing China’s Policy Efforts to Boost Fertility, assesses China’s policy responses to demographic challenges from 2015 to 2025 and considers how China’s experience can inform U.S. policy responses to fertility decline and related demographic challenges.
“When you see a country’s population decline, the country will definitely degrade into a second-rate one,” said Yao Yang, an economist with Peking University’s China Center for Economic Research.
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