Official data released on Monday confirmed that China’s population fell for the fourth consecutive year in 2025, underscoring a deepening demographic crisis that experts warn will accelerate in the coming decades. The National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) said China’s population dropped by 3.39 million to 1.405 billion, marking a faster decline than in 2024. The country also recorded just 7.92 million births in 2025, a dramatic 17% fall from 9.54 million in 2024, while deaths rose to 11.31 million, up from 10.93 million the previous year.
The latest figures reveal a birth rate of 5.63 births per 1,000 people, a level so low that demographer Yi Fuxian of the University of Wisconsin-Madison said it is comparable to China’s population in 1738, when the country had only about 150 million people. Meanwhile, the death rate climbed to 8.04 per 1,000 people, the highest since 1968, further widening the gap between births and deaths and driving the population decline.
China’s shrinking population comes as the nation’s society ages at a rapid pace, complicating Beijing’s plans to boost domestic consumption and control rising debt. The NBS reported that around 23% of China’s population is now over 60 years old. Projections suggest that by 2035, the number of people over 60 will reach 400 million—roughly equivalent to the combined populations of the United States and Italy. This demographic shift threatens to shrink the workforce at a time when pension budgets are already strained. In response, China has raised retirement ages, requiring men to work until 63 instead of 60 and women until 58 instead of 55.
The lingering effects of the one-child policy, which was in force from 1980 to 2015, continue to shape China’s demographic landscape. Marriage rates have collapsed in recent years, a key indicator of future birth trends. In 2024, marriages fell by a fifth to 6.1 million, the largest drop on record. While demographers note that a policy change in May 2025 allowing couples to marry anywhere in the country could briefly boost births, the long-term trend remains bleak. Data from the third quarter of 2025 showed a 22.5% rise in marriages from a year earlier, reaching 1.61 million, suggesting a potential reversal of a nearly decade-long decline. Full marriage data for 2025 will be released later this year.
China’s urbanization has further intensified the demographic challenge. With more people moving from rural areas to cities—where the cost of raising children is significantly higher—many couples are choosing to delay or forgo having children altogether. The urbanization rate rose to 68% in 2025, up from about 43% in 2005.
Population planning has become central to China’s economic strategy, and Beijing is expected to spend an estimated 180 billion yuan ($25.8 billion) this year on policies aimed at boosting births. Key measures include a national child subsidy introduced last year and a pledge to ensure “no out-of-pocket expenses” for women during pregnancy in 2026. The government also plans to fully reimburse medical costs, including in vitro fertilization, under its national insurance system.
Despite these efforts, China’s fertility rate remains among the lowest in the world at about one birth per woman—well below the 2.1 births needed to replace the population. Other East Asian economies, including Taiwan, South Korea, and Singapore, face similarly low fertility levels, hovering around 1.1 births per woman. Compounding the problem, China’s pool of women of reproductive age (15 to 49 years old) is projected to shrink by more than two-thirds to under 100 million by the end of the century, signaling a long-term decline that policymakers may struggle to reverse.
