China's population falls again as birthrate drops 17% to record low

[NickB79]

Source: Guardian

China’s population fell for a fourth consecutive year in 2025 as the birthrate plunged to another record low despite the introduction of polices aimed at encouraging people to have children.

Registered births dropped to 7.92 million in 2025 – or 5.63 for every 1,000 members of the population – down 17% from 9.54 million in 2024, and the lowest since records began in 1949.

The population dropped by 3.39 million to 1.405 billion, a faster fall than 2024, while deaths rose to 11.31 million from 10.93 million in 2024, figures from China’s National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) revealed.

Yi Fuxian, a demographer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said births in 2025 were “roughly the same level as in 1738, when China’s population was only about 150 million”.

Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jan/19/china-population-falls-again-birthrate-record-low

[Norrrm]

1. Yet, within recent memory, China was trying to limit babies to one per family.

[OnlinePoker]

3. Thus causing part of the problem in women aborting female fetuses in favour of males.

Either aborting or the parents committing femicide when a girl was born. I seem to recall a figure of there being 23 million more males in China than there should be due to this policy.

[walkingman]

2. I personally think it would be better for our society if our birthrate also

decreased, and we allowed more legal immigration. Diversity is a plus and most immigrants are very productive citizens.

[angrychair]

4. A more concise measurement

Is TFR or total fertility rate. China does not release that number but it's estimated to be around .9 which is one of the lowest in that world.
For comparison, the TFR for Asia as a whole is 2.26, which is considerably better.
The nominal replacement rate is 2.1 for reference.

That said there are still 1.4 BILLION people in China.
To be clear that is almost as much as all of North America, South America and the EU combined.

[progree]

5. China blocks population debate online, Newsweek, 1/20/26

Various excerpts
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/china-blocks-population-debate-online/ar-AA1Uzpuq

Chinese authorities are blocking searches about the country’s plunging births in an apparent effort to prevent the topic from trending on social media.

While users of Chinese social media platforms such as Weibo are being permitted to post about the newly released population data, searches related to the dire trend have been disabled, Newsweek verified.

A search for the hashtag “birth rate falls below 8 million,” for example, is met with this message: “Sorry, the content for this topic is not displayed.”

In 2025, the statistics bureau recorded 7.92 million births, a decline of 17 percent from 2024 and a return to the country’s seven‑year decline, which was interrupted by a modest uptick that was attributed to the auspicious Year of the Dragon and the effects of China’s post‑pandemic reopening.

Chinese aged 65 and over now make up almost 16 percent of the population, bringing the country closer to joining Japan, South Korea and Taiwan in what the United Nations defines as a “super‑aged society,” where at least one‑fifth of people are 65 or older.