For many decades, the Chinese government attempted 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 had started to plummet at alarming levels.
The aggressive policy — alongside other extreme measures — succeeded far too well, with birth rates dropping a staggering 17 percent between 2024 and 2025 to the lowest level since 1949. The country’s population is now actively shrinking each year, and it’s hard to imagine how the trend could be reversed.
The situation has gotten so dire that Beijing eliminated tax incentives on condoms, hormonal birth control, and other contraceptives, as Fortune reports. Basically, it’s now desperately trying to reverse itself out of a fertility crisis of its own doing. President Xi Jinping has practically been pleading with the country’s women to bear more children.
Yet fewer and fewer women thereare interested in raising a family, sending China well below the “replacement rate” of 2.1 children per woman, meaning the government’s 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 playing out in China is a preview for what’s still to come in many other regions projected to experience a similar decline.
“The empirical evidence from other countries so far is that monetary incentives have almost no effect in raising fertility,” University of California professor of sociology Wang Feng told the New York Times.
Despite its economy growing by five percent last year, over 11 million people died while only 7.92 million babies were born. Meanwhile, a hot new app is trending in China that takes the form of a countdown timer that has to be reset regularly by single people so that their friends and family will know if they die alone.
The number of working-age people is also dropping as the population continues to age, further taxing healthcare systems and pension funds. The major drop in the fertility rate will continue to have devastating effects, shifting demographics that could result in a worsening economic outlook. The cost of raising a child in China is still extremely 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 raising fertility,” Wang told the NYT.
In short, whether taxes on contraceptives and Xi’s calls for a “new type of marriage and childbearing culture” will reverse China’s plummeting birthrate 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 be leaving the workforce — a demographic crisis and ticking time bomb in one.
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