China’s deepening demographic crisis has become one of the most pressing challenges facing President Xi Jinping’s government. Yet despite a decade of increasingly generous incentives, policy reversals, and official campaigns encouraging marriage and childbirth, the country’s fertility collapse shows no sign of slowing. A major new study published in the latest issue of China Leadership Monitor argues that the reasons lie far deeper than economics alone: China’s current fertility crisis is the delayed consequence of the very policies that once made population control one of the Communist Party’s greatest governing achievements.
The article, titled “Why Xi’s Pro-Natalist Turn is Failing: Legibility, Marketized Neo-Familism, and Micropolitical Refusal in China,” is authored by Oxford University scholar Patricia M. Thornton. It presents a stark conclusion. Beijing’s extraordinary capacity to suppress births during the decades-long one-child policy has undermined its ability to encourage births today. In attempting to reverse course, the Chinese state is confronting a society that has been fundamentally transformed by its own past successes.
The demographic numbers are alarming. China’s population declined for a fourth consecutive year in 2025, while registered births fell another 17 percent to just 7.92 million. That figure represents the lowest number of births recorded since the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949. Remarkably, demographers estimate that China is now producing roughly the same number of births as it did in the eighteenth century when its population was a fraction of its current size.
The collapse has occurred despite an unprecedented pro-natalist push from Beijing. In 2025, Premier Li Qiang’s annual government work report promised nationwide childcare subsidies and expanded early-childhood services. The government reportedly allocated around 100 billion yuan toward fertility support measures, most of it funded directly by the central government. Population growth has also been elevated to the level of national security, with official policy documents describing the creation of a “fertility-friendly society” as a strategic priority.
Yet the incentives have produced little measurable impact.
According to Thornton, the central problem is that China’s previous anti-natalist policies succeeded too well. Beginning in 1980, Beijing implemented what became one of the most intrusive systems of reproductive governance ever attempted by a modern state. Through birth quotas, permits, surveillance systems, administrative penalties, and a vast bureaucracy dedicated to family planning, the government claimed to have prevented hundreds of millions of births.
For decades, Chinese officials celebrated the policy as a triumph. It was credited with accelerating economic development, reducing environmental pressures, and contributing to modernization. However, the policy also transformed social norms, family structures, and economic expectations in ways that are proving extremely difficult to reverse.
Thornton argues that the one-child policy did more than reduce fertility. Combined with market reforms, it reshaped how Chinese families viewed children themselves. Smaller families became the norm. Parents concentrated enormous resources on a single child. Educational achievement became increasingly competitive and expensive. Child-rearing evolved into a high-investment project requiring significant financial sacrifice.
The result was the emergence of what the study calls a “neo-familist” social order. In urban China, the familiar “4-2-1” family structure became widespread: four grandparents and two parents focusing their resources on one child. Family life increasingly revolved around maximizing the success and social mobility of that only child.
As China’s economy expanded and consumer culture deepened, the costs associated with raising children rose dramatically. Educational spending, extracurricular tutoring, housing costs, and healthcare expenses became major burdens for households. Parents increasingly viewed child-rearing not simply as a family obligation but as a high-risk financial commitment.
The numbers are striking. According to China’s National Fertility Expenses Report 2024, the average cost of raising a child to age 17 reached approximately 538,000 yuan. Educational expenses alone accounted for more than half of total child-rearing costs. For many families, raising a single child requires financial resources equivalent to the full income of one working parent.
These realities have helped create what Chinese demographers describe as a “low fertility trap”—a situation in which social expectations, economic pressures, and cultural norms reinforce low birth rates even after government restrictions are removed.
The study argues that Beijing’s current strategy is failing because encouraging births is fundamentally different from preventing them. The one-child policy relied on administrative tools that the state could directly monitor and enforce. Fertility promotion, by contrast, depends on decisions made by households, employers, local governments, and individuals whose interests do not necessarily align with those of the central leadership.
Local governments, already burdened by debt and slowing economic growth, often struggle to finance generous family-support programs. Private employers frequently resist expanded maternity benefits because of rising labor costs and intense competition. Many companies continue to discriminate against women of childbearing age or attempt to limit when employees can become pregnant.
Meanwhile, younger Chinese increasingly show little enthusiasm for marriage or parenthood.
The study highlights numerous examples of growing public resistance. In one widely discussed incident earlier this year, a Uyghur comedian known as Xiao Pa joked online that illness had made her appreciate the freedom of not having a husband or children to care for. Authorities suspended her social media account, accusing her of promoting anxiety about marriage and childbirth. The incident triggered widespread criticism online and became a symbol of official sensitivity surrounding demographic issues.
Public skepticism has also greeted many government initiatives. Social media users have mocked childbirth subsidies as equivalent to offering “a 50-yuan discount coupon for a Lamborghini.” Others point out that while governments may offer a few thousand yuan for having a child, avoiding parenthood saves hundreds of thousands of yuan in future expenses.
Surveys cited in the study suggest these attitudes are particularly common among younger generations. A nationwide survey of more than 36,000 university students found that nearly half did not plan to marry, while more than half did not intend to have children. Such figures point to a profound shift in social values that financial incentives alone may be unable to reverse.
The article also argues that the legacy of the one-child era extends beyond economics. Many citizens retain memories of coercive population-control campaigns, creating a lingering distrust of government involvement in reproductive decisions. Research cited in the study indicates that trust in local government is strongly linked to fertility intentions among younger Chinese adults.
Perhaps most significantly, the one-child generation appears to have developed attitudes that differ sharply from those of earlier generations. Studies suggest that only children tend to display greater individualism and less willingness to accept obligations framed in terms of national duty or collective sacrifice. Appeals to have more children for the sake of national development therefore resonate far less strongly than they might have in previous decades.
Thornton concludes that China’s fertility crisis resembles a classic case of unintended consequences. Drawing on political scientist James C. Scott’s theory of state-led social engineering, she argues that the one-child policy was not a failure in the conventional sense. It achieved many of its immediate objectives. The problem is that its long-term success transformed society in ways that now undermine the state’s new demographic goals.
The irony is profound. The same government that once mobilized vast administrative machinery to prevent births is now spending billions to encourage them. Yet while prohibiting childbirth could be enforced through bureaucracy and coercion, encouraging people to have children requires changing deeply embedded social expectations, economic calculations, and personal aspirations.
For Xi Jinping, the challenge may be one of the most difficult policy reversals in modern Chinese history. The latest issue of China Leadership Monitor suggests that Beijing is no longer fighting demographic decline alone. It is also struggling against the social order created by decades of its own successful population engineering. If that assessment is correct, China’s fertility crisis may prove far more resistant to government intervention than officials in Beijing had anticipated.
