China’s Population Hits Rock Bottom: The One-Child Policy May Have Destroyed the Country’s Future
China’s demographic crisis deepened in 2025 as births fell to a record low of 5.63 per 1,000 people while the death rate rose to 8.04 per 1,000, and the population dropped by 3.39 million to about 1.4 billion — the fourth consecutive annual decline. Experts attribute the trend to long-term effects of the one-child policy (ended in 2016 and relaxed to two then three children), which contributed to a skewed sex ratio, fewer young people to support the elderly, and persistent social and economic disincentives to having children. More than 20% of China’s population is now over 60,and projections suggest the share could reach about half by 2100. The government has launched pro-birth campaigns and recent policies — controversially including taxes on some contraceptives — to try to raise fertility, but high child-rearing costs and economic headwinds such as a real estate crisis complicate those efforts. The one-child era also left a legacy of human-rights abuses,including forced abortions and cases of abandonment,which continue to shape public attitudes and demographic outcomes.
China’s birth rate hit rock bottom, one decade after it announced the end of its one-child policy, multiple outlets reported Monday.
Total births in China plummeted to 5.63 per 1,000 people in 2025, marking a record low since the Chinese Communist Party officially took power in 1949. At the same time, the country’s death rate increased to 8.04 per 1,000 people, the highest level since 1968, according to multiple reports citing government data.
Meanwhile, the country’s population fell for the fourth straight year, dropping 3.39 million to hit 1.4 billion by the end of 2025, BBC News reported.
“The pace of the decline is striking, particularly in the absence of major shocks,” Yue Su, principal economist at Economist Intelligence Unit, told CNBC on Monday.
The newly released demographic data comes as China has grappled with a continually declining population in recent years.
China introduced its controversial nationwide one-child policy in the late 1970s in an effort to decrease the country’s then-massive population, according to the National Library of Medicine. In 2015, China announced it had decided to scrap the policy and replace it with a two-child limit, which lasted until 2021 in favor of a three-child policy.
While the one-child policy officially ended in January 2016, experts have warned that it has contributed to ongoing demographic issues such as a heavily skewed ratio of men to women, and having a shortage of younger relatives able to provide care for a continuously aging population, The New York Times reported in October 2015.
Additionally, China’s one-child policy sometimes resulted in forced abortions and mothers’ deaths, the Los Angeles Times reported in June 2012. In the 1980s, the policy also led to some parents in China either abandoning their daughters, committing infanticide, or giving them away, which partly contributed to Chinese babies — primarily girls — being adopted in the West, NPR reported in February 2016.
Moreover, since China switched to the three-child policy beginning in 2021, the Chinese government has been promoting national campaigns in an effort to create a “pro-birth culture” amid its continuously aging and declining population, CNN reported in August 2024. People over the age of 60 now make up over 20 percent of China’s total population of 1.4 billion people, and could account for a whopping half of the population by 2100, CNN reported on Jan. 1, citing projections from the United Nations.
Beijing has recently begun introducing new taxes on condoms, birth control pills, and other contraceptives in an effort to bolster China’s population, Fortune reported on Jan. 16. China is notably one of the most expensive countries in the world for families to raise a child, BBC News reported in December 2025, citing data from a 2024 report by the YuWa Population Research Institute in Beijing.
China has also faced a spate of economic struggles in recent years, such as a major real estate crisis.
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