China’s population has declined for a 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 of 1.404 billion in 2025, a drop of about three million people from the previous year.
More than a decade after scrapping its decades-long one-child policy, Chinese authorities have rolled out a wide range of measures aimed at boosting birth rates. These have included cash incentives, tax changes affecting childcare services and matchmakers, and even proposals targeting the cost of contraception. However, the impact has so far been limited.
In a 2016 report published shortly after the policy’s abolition, the Brookings Institution described China’s one-child policy as “one of the costliest lessons of misguided public policymaking.” Birth rates have since fallen to their lowest level since the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949.
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 year-on-year decline of 1.62 million births, or 17 per cent, compared with 2024. The drop erased a brief and fragile uptick seen a year earlier, underscoring that China’s long-term decline in births remains deeply entrenched after seven straight years of falling numbers through 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 key reasons for delaying or avoiding parenthood altogether.
As one expert noted, the challenge lies in deep-rooted structural issues such as housing, employment, and education expectations. “Until those are addressed,” the expert said, “it will be difficult to make any major change to birth numbers.”
