China's Population Problem

is a crisis of China's own making. A crisis that will just reshape the nation's economy, but will also handcuff Beijing's international ambitions. China's population is falling, and it is falling fast. Figures from China's National Bureau of Statistics, or NBS, revealed that in 2025, the population dropped by 3.39 million to 1.405 billion. The only other time that China's population fell so steeply was during the catastrophic famine of Maoadong's great leap forward from 1959 to 1961. Two things caused this latest drop. First, the number of deaths had increased from 10.93 million in 2024 to 11.31 million. Second, and perhaps more importantly, the number of registered births was 7.92 million, down 17% from 2024 and its lowest since records began in 1949. This number is so low that according to Yi Fushian, a demographer at the University of Wisconsin Madison, it was roughly the same level as in 1738 when China's population was only about 150 million. And we'll say that again in 2025 with a population of more than 1.4 billion people. China had the same number of births as in 1738 when the population was roughly onetenth the size. This is the fourth consecutive year that China's population has fallen. And if this trend does continue, the UN estimates that it could drop to 800 million by the end of the century. That is an unprecedented fall, especially for a country whose economic growth and superpower ambitions are heavily pegged to its population. As things stand, the decline seems irreversible and that could have major impacts on China's place in the emerging global order. The decline. Now, first of all, we need to examine why China's population is falling so fast. While conventional wisdom would point to the one child policy, the population planning initiative that ran from 1979 to 2015 as the main cause of China's population crisis, that isn't entirely the case. Now, while it did undoubtedly contribute to the decrease in the country's fertility rate, the number of children per woman, that is, it wasn't the only issue at play. So, what went wrong? Now, according to Fang Wang, a former analyst at the Brookings Institution, China's issues began in the 1970s before the implementation of the one child policy. China's fertility rate had already been declining in the 1970s under another policy calling for later marriage, longer birth intervals, and fewer births.