According to Chinese government data released last month, the country’s birth rate dropped 17 percent year-over-year in 2025, reaching its lowest point since 1949. Demographers and U.N. forecasters were shocked, as a drop of this magnitude was unexpected. With only 7.92 million births and just over 11 million deaths, China’s overall population shrank by more than 3 million people last year, driven almost entirely by the decline in births. The only other time in the history of the People’s Republic of China that the population fell so steeply was during the catastrophic famine of Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward, from 1959 to 1961.
As some analysts have noted, China’s problem is not that married couples are having fewer children. It is that fewer people are choosing to marry in the first place. After Beijing did away with its infamous one-child policy in 2016—births among married couples did increase slightly. But the marriage rate declined by 20 percent in 2024, after falling nearly every year since 2013.
Much of the concerns over China’s demographic crisis are economic. China’s inadequate pension system isn’t prepared for the surge of elderly people retiring in the next few decades, and the absolute decline in the working-age population could cause labor shortages. But there are policy solutions for these problems, such as greater reliance on automation and further increases in the central government’s spending on social welfare, which is still low compared to international norms.