China’s National Bureau of Statistics published the 2026 edition of its yearbook this week, revealing that the national population declined by 3.39 million in 2025 — the fourth decline in a row, and the worst since 2022.
China’s population remains enormous at over 1.4 billion, but the cycle of births and deaths left it 7.71 million people smaller than it was in 2021, the beginning of China’s seemingly inexorable population decline.
Foreign Affairs called it “China’s long twilight,” pointing out that the situation for China was graver than the total population numbers indicated, because a generation of much-needed young workers is not being born:
By the 2040s, if China continues to follow East Asia’s descent to ultralow fertility rates, it will shed around one percent of its population annually—roughly ten million people, more than the population of New York City. At the same time, the proportion of China’s population aged 65 and older will surge, doubling from 15 percent today to around 30 percent in the 2040s, and then rising to well over 40 percent by the late twenty-first century. The size of that cohort in the United States, by contrast, is projected to rise far more gradually, from around 19 percent of the population today to just over 23 percent in 2060.
Put simply, China is entering a century of demographic decline. This change will remake the country’s economy and politics just as dramatically as the last century’s demographic boom did.
Signs of this century of decline include China’s “increasingly regressive and rigid” political system, which relies on “repression and reflexively following central mandates” instead of innovation.
Foreign Affairs pointed out that China’s economy under dictator Xi Jinping relies heavily upon pumping out waves of cheap exports as domestic consumer demand withers, while its government is increasingly a one-man show marked by sudden purges of top officials, without the flexibility that characterized the boom years — and growing population — of Xi’s predecessor Deng Xiaoping.
“Even as the country heads toward a demographic cliff, Beijing seems incapable of preparing for the social challenges it will face in the decades ahead,” the article concluded.
The American Enterprise Institute (AEI) argued that China’s sudden “birth crash” would undermine every plan the Politburo made over the previous two decades, because those plans were premised on a growing industrial base of young workers.
AEI placed much of the blame on China’s infamous “One Child” policy of forced abortions, which crippled Chinese fertility rates in the 90s and set the stage for a “full-blown plunge” in the 2010s. The post-One Child “birth shock” produced the kind of population decline that usually follows a devastating war or plague.
“With less than half as many babies in 2025 as in 2016, China’s working age manpower is set on a crash course in the generation ahead: we can see this already, and there is very little Beijing can do to alter that trajectory,” the AEI analysis observed.
This spotlights a problem vexing China’s central planners: their effort to recover from the demographic damage of the One Child Policy ran smack into the general trend among industrialized nations for birthrates to decline as young women pursue educational and career opportunities. Combined with an aging population that benefits from longer lifespans thanks to modern medicine, and the result is a growing number of elderly people without children and grandchildren to care for them, or build the kind of intergenerational wealth that accumulates in larger families.
“The withering away of China’s extended family networks — the people’s only reliable social safety net since the dawn of Chinese civilization — will surely have profound and far-reaching implications, few of them beneficial,” AEI noted, wondering if China might become less aggressive about grabbing territory outside its borders as it grows more concerned with its ability to sustain wartime casualties.
The Rand Corporation pointed out that China is “yet to become a high-income nation,” for all its boasts of explosive economic growth and reduced poverty. This means China never collected the “demographic dividend” that accrued to other fast-growing Asian powers a generation or two ago, and now Beijing has “fewer resources to address the pressures of an aging population.”
Stated another way, the burden of paying the expenses of a large elderly population will fall even more heavily on today’s Chinese workers, because they never experienced the per-capita boom of other nations that are now facing demographic decline.
“The United States and Japan got rich before they got old, but China got old before it got rich, which will pose challenges in the future,” Rand said.
The Chinese Communist government is still trying to correct demographic decline through programs that subsidize the high cost of having children. Last week, the Chinese State Council — roughly equivalent to a presidential Cabinet — recommended building a “fertility-friendly society” with more financial support for maternity care, preschool care, and school tuition.
The State Council also suggested “equalizing” services for rural Chinese who move to big cities, because the current household registration system bars them from some of the benefits that native city-dwellers enjoy.
The problem is that China has been pumping up subsidies for maternity and child care for years, as have other countries in demographic decline, and making it cheaper to have children has only modest benefits on birthrates. No industrialized nation has yet discovered the magic formula for convincing young people, especially young women, to postpone career success so they can start raising large families before they hit middle age.