For several decades, the Chinese government tried to limit population growth through a one-child policy – only to abolish the rule in 2016 as it realized that the number of annual births began to decrease at alarming levels.
The aggressive policy – along with other extreme measures – succeeded far too well, with birth rates falling a staggering 17 percent between 2024 and 2025 to the lowest level since 1949. The country’s population is now actively shrinking every year, and it is hard to imagine how the trend can be reversed.
The situation has become so dire that Beijing has eliminated tax incentives on condoms, hormonal birth control, and other contraceptives, as Fortune reports. Basically, he is now desperately trying to reverse a fertility crisis of his own. President Xi Jinping has practically been asking the country’s women to have more children.
However, fewer and fewer women are interested in raising a family, sending China well below the “replacement rate” of 2.1 children per woman, meaning government interventions are doing little to address the issue. Many countries around the world, including most of North and South America, and Europe, are already experiencing below-replacement fertility rates. The situation unfolding in China is a preview of what is yet to come in many other regions projected to experience similar declines.
“The empirical evidence from other countries so far is that monetary incentives have almost no effect on increasing fertility,” said Wang Feng, professor of sociology at the University of California. New York Times.
Despite its economy growing by five percent last year, more than 11 million people died while only 7.92 million babies were born. Meanwhile, a hot new app is a trend in China that takes the form of a countdown timer that must be reset regularly by single people so that their friends and family will know if they die alone.
The number of people of working age is also falling as the population continues to age, further taxing health care systems and pension funds. The large decline in the fertility rate will continue to have devastating effects, changing demographics that could result in worsening economic prospects. The cost of raising children in China is still very high compared to other countries.
“With China’s economic woes, young people may want to wait and see, and that’s not good news for increasing fertility,” Wang told the NOW.
In short, whether taxes on contraceptives and Xi’s calls for a “new kind of marriage and one-child culture” will reverse China’s declining birth rate remains unclear at best.
The country’s population has been shrinking since 2022, and judging by the latest numbers, the trend is bound to continue. And as the population continues to age, hundreds of millions could soon leave the workforce – a demographic crisis and a ticking time bomb in one.
More about China’s population: Hot New App Makes Single people constantly check in case they die alone