China’s Birth Rate Hits a New Low

China has been doing everything it can think of to get it’s birthrate up and none of it seems to be working. On the contrary, despite sustained efforts, the Chinese birthrate just hit the lowest level ever recorded.

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 birthrate plunged to a record low, leaving its population smaller and older.

The government on Monday said 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 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.

Official statistics go back to 1949, the year of the communist revolution. So the only reason this decline only goes back that far is because we don’t have reliable numbers prior to that date. But the fact that a nation of 1.4 billion people failed to produce even 8 million babies in a year seems remarkable. That’s a drop of 17% from the previous year. China isn’t publishing a fertility rate but the estimate is very low.

The number of new babies born was just 7.92 million in 2025, a decline of 1.62 million, or 17%, from the previous year…

Like many other countries in Asia, China has faced a declining fertility rate, or the average number of babies a woman is expected to have in her lifetime. While the government does not regularly publish a fertility rate, last saying it was 1.3 in 2020, experts have estimated it is now around 1. Both figures are far below the 2.1 rate that would maintain the size of China’s population.

A fertility rate of 1 puts China among the lowest rates in the world. This list from the UN puts China at #228 out of #237 countries. And countries is being generous as some of the places that come in below China on the list including Macau, Hong Kong and Vatican City.

The Washington Post’s editorial board points out that all of this is China’s fault.

The Chinese Communist Party is learning the hard way that societal engineering, even if it “succeeds” according to the wishes of central planners, comes with horrible costs and can be irreversible.

From 1979 to 2015, Beijing imposed its one-child policy. The Chinese government acted on the “population bomb” fears that were common among many Western elites in the 1970s. Unlike in the West, where democracy restrained the most extreme forms of population control, China went all-in.

Forced abortions and sterilizations, combined with fines and propaganda, snuffed out many millions of lives. Unborn girls were particularly victimized because of sex-selective abortions. This system sustained itself long after its barbaric consequences became indisputable because of bureaucratic bloat and inertia…

Economist Milton Friedman once said that if you put government in charge of the Sahara Desert, there would be a shortage of sand. It turns out that if you put communists in charge of China, they’re capable of causing a shortage of people.

Of course a few bad years don’t matter all that much. What really matters is the long term trend. And for China the long-term trend is a population collapse.

Experts at the United Nations believe China’s population will continue on a downward trajectory, estimating that the nation will lose more than half of its current population by 2100.

A shrinking population has economic and social implications for the world’s second-largest economy: exacerbating an already declining workforce and weak consumer sentiment.

With many young people moving away from their parents, there is also a growing number of seniors who are being left to look after themselves or rely on government payments.

But the pension pot is running dry, according to the state-run Chinese Academy of Social Sciences – and the country is running out of time to build enough funds to care for its growing elderly population.

A country that doesn’t want to be bothered to care for children certainly won’t want to be bothered to care for the elderly. The stories coming out of China over the next few decades would be horrific if they had a free press. But state media will make sure none of the bad news about how the elderly are living ever appears on televisions.

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