China’s population has declined for the fourth consecutive year, despite sustained government efforts to encourage couples to have more children.
Official data released on Monday showed that the world’s second-most populous country recorded a population drop in 2025, with total numbers falling to 1.404 billion — about three million fewer people than in the previous year.
Ten years after scrapping its long-standing one-child policy, Chinese authorities have rolled out various measures aimed at boosting birth rates. These efforts have included cash incentives, proposals to tax contraceptives, and the removal of certain taxes on matchmakers and childcare centres.
In a 2016 report published shortly after the policy was abolished, the Brookings Institution described China’s one-child policy as “one of the costliest lessons of misguided public policymaking.”
Birth rates have now sunk to their lowest point since the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, when Mao Zedong’s Communist Party came to power.
In 2025, just 5.63 births were recorded per 1,000 people — the weakest figure on record — with only 7.92 million babies born. This represented a sharp decline of 1.62 million births, or 17 per cent, compared with 2024.
The drop erased a brief and fragile rise seen the previous year, reinforcing signs that China’s long-term decline in births remains firmly in place after seven straight years of falling figures up to 2023.
China, once the world’s most populous nation, was overtaken by regional rival India in 2023.
Many families point to the high cost of living, intense academic pressure, and the financial burden of raising children in a highly competitive society as reasons for postponing or avoiding parenthood.
As one expert noted, “These are deep structural issues — housing, employment, getting started in life, and expectations around education. It will be difficult to significantly change birth numbers until those challenges are addressed.”
