Why China’s Population Decline Is Irreversible

A man and two children in Shanghai in a file photo. China faces challenges of an aging population, declining labor force, and gender imbalance resulting from 30 years under its population control policy. AFP/Getty Images

Commentary

China’s demographic collapse is so advanced that even an immediate return to replacement-level fertility cannot prevent a massive population decline because there are simply too few women of childbearing age.

The aging crisis facing China is well documented and widely reported. The crisis stems from a combination of longer life expectancies and a reduction in births below the replacement level of 2.1 children per woman. The result is a smaller workforce, a smaller pool of taxpayers, a smaller group of consumers driving the economy, and a growing population of retirees who need financial and medical support.

China’s aging crisis, however, is so acute that this framing misses a crucial structural issue. Currently, the pool of women capable of bearing children is so depleted that even an overnight return to replacement-level fertility cannot prevent substantial population decline.

China has approximately 190 million women of childbearing age. Even if the fertility rate were to immediately rise to 2.1, the population would still decline by more than 40 percent by the end of the century. The demographic pyramid has already determined the outcome. The trajectory is irreversible.

China’s population has contracted for four consecutive years. According to the National Bureau of Statistics’ 2025 Statistical Communiqué, the total population stood at 1.40489 billion at the end of 2025, a net decrease of 3.39 million people. Births numbered 7.92 million against 11.31 million deaths, yielding a natural growth rate of negative 2.41 per thousand, the steepest annual loss on record outside of the 1959–1961 famine caused by Mao’s misguided policies.

The 2024 uptick, driven by the auspicious Year of the Dragon, proved to be an outlier. The number of births fell by 17 percent in 2025, reaching the lowest level since the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949.

Rhodium Group’s April 2026 analysis projects that even if births remain at 2025 levels for the next decade, the annual population decline will widen to 7.6 million by 2035, implying a cumulative loss of nearly 60 million people between 2026 and 2035, roughly equivalent to the population of France.

RAND projects that by mid-century, China could lose 250 million people from its current population of 1.4 billion. The U.N.’s longer-range estimate puts China’s population as low as 663 million by 2100 if current trends persist.

The crude birth rate of 5.63 per thousand in 2025, confirmed by the National Bureau of Statistics, was the lowest since 1949. China’s total fertility rate has fallen to approximately 1.0, less than half the replacement level of 2.1, placing it among what demographers classify as “lowest-low” fertility societies, alongside South Korea and Singapore.

The one-child policy, which began in 1980, prevented hundreds of millions of births, reducing the average number of children per family from six to fewer than two. As the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) became aware of the looming demographic collapse, the policy was relaxed to allow two children in 2016 and then expanded to three children in 2021.

However, the shift to a two-child policy resulted in only a brief uptick in births, and the expansion to three children had almost no meaningful impact.

The cohorts now entering peak childbearing age are the children of the one-child generation, already a reduced cohort, and are now themselves having fewer children than their parents did. Each generation compounds the deficit of the last.

In major cities, the situation is worse still. Beijing’s population aged 20 to 29 fell from 4.6 million in 2015 to 2.5 million in 2024, a drop of more than 2.1 million, while residents aged 60 and above rose by more than 1.7 million during the same period. Shanghai recorded approximately 107,000 births against 164,000 deaths in 2025, a natural decrease of 57,000, offset only by net in-migration of more than 100,000. Rhodium Group notes that China’s most developed coastal provinces are growing solely through internal migration, not reproduction.

The number of women of childbearing age has been further reduced by sex-selective births. China’s sex ratio stands at 1.04 males per female overall, and the imbalance is more pronounced in younger cohorts. The population of women in their 20s fell by 35 million between 2010 and 2021. Those women were never born. They cannot be incentivized, legislated, or subsidized into existence.

On current decline projections, China’s elderly population aged 65 and older stands at 211 million, while the 50 to 64 age cohorts add another 325 million. Those cohorts will die before a new generation reaches maturity. U.N. projections estimate that China’s population will fall from 1.4 billion to 633 million by 2100 under current trajectories, the largest absolute population loss of any nation over that period. Even an immediate return to replacement-level fertility would not reverse the trend.

With only 190 million women of childbearing age, there are simply not enough potential mothers to offset the mortality burden of the older generations. The 40 percent decline estimate is conservative relative to the U.N. baseline because it assumes fertility immediately and permanently returns to 2.1, a scenario no demographer currently projects.

The CCP is not unaware of the crisis. CCP leader Xi Jinping has publicly called for a new culture of marriage and childbearing. The government has extended maternity leave, offered cash bonuses for newborns, and eliminated tax incentives on contraceptives. None of these measures has worked. In fact, they have all been tried before and failed. South Korea, facing a similar aging crisis, spent roughly $280 billion on pro-natalist programs over two decades, more per capita than any country in history, and still watched its fertility rate fall from 1.08 in 2006 to 0.68 by 2024.

Money and incentives cannot manufacture women who were never born. The demographic collapse is now mathematically guaranteed. The CCP may have finally defeated China.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.