Despite the government’s best efforts, China’s birth rate just hit a new low
Deaths in the nation, meanwhile, have never been higher in the 21st century.
China’s birth rate last year hit the lowest point on record since the formation of the People’s Republic in 1949, dropping to a concerning 5.63 births per 1,000 people, according to new figures from the country’s National Bureau of Statistics. For context, that’s less than half the rate recorded as recently as nine years ago.
Kids slide
In 2025, China recorded just 7.9 million new births, per the new data released today, as the country’s overall population shrank for the fourth year in a row, building on a worrying trend that arrived sooner than experts had been expecting, as we charted at the time. In tandem with the record-low number of newborns, deaths in the nation also hit a 21st-century high, intensifying concerns around the global powerhouse’s future as China’s population pyramid is set to become severely inverted if current trends continue.
Officials in Beijing have, understandably, been rolling back previously strict policies to stop the drop for years now: the government officially dropped its notorious one-child cap at the start of 2016 and then scrapped the two-child policy that replaced it in the summer of 2021, when it also abolished fines for parents who exceeded the new three-child limit, too.
As the numbers coming out of the statistics office have become more extreme in both directions, so too have the measures that the state has been taking to reverse the birth rate decline. Last July, for example, the Chinese national government announced that it would give families 3,600 yuan (roughly $500, at the time) each year for every child they had that was 3 and under. This year, things have picked up again, with a new 13% VAT rate on condoms, birth control, and other contraceptive items.
