New government data show China’s population shrank again in 2025, with births dropping to their lowest level since the Communist revolution despite billions spent on incentives.
By yourNEWS Media Newsroom
China’s birth rate fell to its lowest level since the Communist revolution of 1949 in 2025, according to newly released government data, underscoring the deepening demographic crisis confronting the world’s second-largest economy despite years of aggressive and expensive efforts to encourage couples to have more children.
Official figures show China’s population stood at 1.404 billion at the end of 2025, a net decline of roughly three million people from the previous year. The national birth rate dropped to 5.63 births per 1,000 people, the lowest ever recorded. Just 7.92 million children were born during the year, a 17 percent decrease from 2024, when births saw a temporary uptick driven by auspicious Chinese Zodiac signs and a wave of weddings delayed during the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic.
The downturn came as 2025 marked the Year of the Snake, traditionally viewed as an unfavorable year for childbirth in the Chinese Zodiac. While state media attempted to reassure prospective parents that the superstition should not deter them, analysts said cultural beliefs likely compounded broader structural pressures.
Stuart Gietel-Basen, director of the Center for Aging Science at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, told the Associated Press that superstition plays a minor role compared with systemic challenges.
“Big structural issues” such as China’s slowing economy, weaker job prospects, difficulty purchasing housing, intense social competition, and the high cost of raising children are the primary drivers, he said.
“It’s gonna be difficult to make a major change in the number of births until those are addressed,” Gietel-Basen said.
Chinese authorities have poured resources into addressing some of those pressures and are preparing to spend significantly more. A recent Reuters analysis tallied the combined cost of existing and newly announced pro-natalist measures at approximately $25.8 billion for 2026.
“The estimate includes the cost of the national child subsidy, which was introduced for the first time last year, as well as expected insurance payments,” Reuters reported. “The government pledged that women in 2026 would have ‘no out-of-pocket expenses’ during their pregnancy, with all medical costs, including in vitro fertilization (IVF), fully reimbursable under its national medical insurance fund.”
The scale of the spending has drawn comparisons to Japan and South Korea, which have faced similar demographic collapses. Both countries invested heavily in family subsidies and support programs years earlier, yet neither has succeeded in reversing population decline. South Korea, in particular, has spent more per capita than China with little effect, while Japan’s earlier adoption of pro-birth policies has not stopped long-term contraction.
China has also turned to more controversial measures. At the start of 2026, authorities ended the tax exemption for contraceptives, immediately raising prices by about 13 percent. Reuters reported that many Chinese social media users mocked the move, rejecting the idea that higher condom prices would encourage childbirth.
“What gives people the confidence to have children has never been the price tag on a condom, but their faith in the future,” one commenter wrote.
Some analysts argue China is still dealing with the long-term consequences of the “One Child Policy,” enforced from 1979 to 2015 through coercive measures including forced abortions. Although the Communist Party later reversed course and began urging families to have multiple children, the demographic damage has proven difficult to undo.
The policy skewed gender ratios by incentivizing male births, creating a shortage of women of child-bearing age. It also made Chinese society more socially comfortable with small or childless families, accelerating trends seen across industrialized nations.
Writing in Fortune, Texas A&M University sociologist Dudley L. Poston Jr. noted that modernization has played a decisive role.
“In China – as in South Korea, Japan, and much of the Western world – modernization has led to better educational and work opportunities for women,” Poston wrote, a shift that often reduces fertility as women invest more time in education and careers.
Poston also pointed to declining interest in marriage among younger generations, a trend with outsized impact in China and other Asian societies where having children outside marriage remains heavily stigmatized. He added that China is “one of the world’s most expensive countries in which to raise a child, when compared to average income,” particularly because of education costs.
Most troubling for policymakers, Poston highlighted the concept of the “low-fertility trap,” a demographic theory suggesting that once fertility rates fall below roughly 1.5 for an extended period, reversing the decline becomes extraordinarily difficult.
The theory holds that when small families become culturally entrenched, reducing economic pressures alone has limited impact because social norms around marriage and child-rearing have fundamentally changed.
China’s fertility rate for the coming year is projected to fall between 0.9 and 1.02, well below the threshold at which the low-fertility trap is thought to take hold. As a result, large numbers of older workers are set to exit the labor force with too few younger workers to replace them or fund pension and health-care systems.
“The decline in China’s fertility is inevitable, like a giant rock rolling down a hill,” Yi Fuxian, a leading Chinese demographer at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, told the Financial Times. “China’s one-child policy accelerated the process. It will be very difficult to move it back uphill.”