China Hits Lowest Birth Rate Since Communist Revolution of 1949

The Chinese government on Monday released its latest round of dismal demographic data, revealing birth rates have hit their lowest level since the Communist revolution of 1949, and the population is still declining despite years of expensive efforts to convince more couples to have children.

China’s population at the end of 2025 was 1.404 billion, a net decline of about three million from 2024. The birth rate sank to 5.63 per 1,000 people, the lowest level on record. Only 7.92 million children were born last year, down 17 percent from last year, when a slight increase in births was caused by favorable Chinese Zodiac signs, plus a rash of weddings delayed by the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic.

2025 was the Year of the Snake, an unfavorable year for having children under the Chinese Zodiac, which could account for part of the birthrate slump despite state media efforts to reassure fertile young couples that the Year of the Snake really isn’t so bad after all.

Stuart Gietel-Basen, director of the Center for Aging Science at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, told the Associated Press (AP) that “big structural issues” – including China’s slipping economy, reduced job prospects, the difficulty of buying a home, the competitive nature of Chinese society, and the high cost of child-rearing – were more important factors than zodiac superstition.

“It’s gonna be difficult to make a major change in the number of births until those are addressed,” Gietel-Basen predicted.

China has actually invested a great deal of money in addressing some of those factors, and it is about to spend a great deal more. Last week, Reuters tallied up the cost of both existing and new programs to improve China’s birth rate, and came up with a price tag of $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. 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,” Reuters reported.

As the report noted, other Asian countries with cratering birth rates like Japan and South Korea have made big investments to address the economic factors often blamed for population decline, and found little more success than China. In fact, South Korea spent much more, and Japan began its pro-natalist policies much earlier than China, but neither of them has been able to keep their populations from declining.

One of China’s new tactics for spurring childbirth is ending the tax exemption for contraceptives, which instantly made them about 13 percent more expensive on January 1. Reuters noted that Chinese social media users scoffed at the notion they would have more children after condoms became more expensive – an interesting inversion of the manufactured political controversy over contraceptive costs in the United States a decade ago.

“What gives people the confidence to have children has never been the price tag on a condom, but their faith in the future,” remarked one Chinese social media commentator.

Some analysts believe China is still working through a societal hangover from the “One Child Policy,” the regime’s brutish use of forced abortions to keep the population down between 1979 and 2015. The Communist regime soon began actively encouraging people to have multiple children after ending the One Child Policy, but the demographic damage proved very difficult to reverse.

One reason was that male children were preferred during the One Child years, artificially creating a shortage of fertile women. Another was that Chinese people became more socially comfortable with having few or zero children, accelerating the process of declining birthrates that seems to grip every industrialized nation in the 21st Century.

Writing at Fortune on Friday, sociology professor Dudley L. Poston Jr. of Texas A&M University noted that in China – as in South Korea, Japan, and much of the Western world – “modernization has led to better educational and work opportunities for women,” and that tends to reduce birth rates sharply, because women choose to invest their prime child-bearing years in obtaining an advanced education and building their careers.

Modernization also seems to make both young men and young women less interested in getting married, and this has a particularly heavy impact on birth rates in China and other Asian societies, with their intense social stigma against having children out of wedlock.

Poston also noted that China is “one of the world’s most expensive countries in which to raise a child, when compared to average income,” particularly when considering the cost of education for children.

Most dismayingly – for China and every other nation in demographic decline – Poston described the “low-fertility trap,” a theory that says arresting demographic decline becomes extremely difficult once fertility rates fall below 1.5

The low-fertility trap essentially states that when birth rates fall below a certain level for a number of years, small family sizes become “baked into” the fabric of a culture. Economic factors, such as China’s sputtering economy and high cost of child-rearing, may help to push fertility rates below 1.5 – but once they hit such lows, reducing the economic pressures does not help much, because small or nonexistent families have become the norm. All of the non-economic factors that encourage young people to get married and have children early in their lives have disappeared, and absent a major social upheaval, they are unlikely to return.

China’s birth rate for the coming year is projected to be somewhere between 0.9 and 1.02, far below the line at which the mechanics of the low-fertility trap kick in. A huge number of aging people will soon begin leaving China’s workforce, and there are not enough incoming young workers to pay for their benefits. 

“The decline in China’s fertility is inevitable, like a giant rock rolling down a hill. China’s one-child policy accelerated the process. It will be very difficult to move it back uphill,” Chinese demographics expert Yi Fuxian of the University of Wisconsin-Madison told the Financial Times on Sunday.