Biggest Threat to China’s Growing Power? No One Wants to Get Married

The United States and most of the Western world have been mired in a decades-long fertility crisis. But it’s nothing compared to the total collapse in marriage and birth rates in China – an alarming trend that the communist government appears powerless to reverse.

For all its authoritarian levers of power, Beijing has been unable to defuse the looming demographic time bomb facing the nation of 1.4 billion people. According to official data out last month, there were just 1.7 million marriage registrations in the first quarter of 2026 – down 6.2 percent from last year and just half of the 2017 figure.

That marriage rate collapse has corresponded with a fertility rate collapse, as marriage is still very much a prerequisite to having children in China. While government data is difficult to trust, the best estimates are that the country’s fertility rate now hovers around 1.0 births per woman – well below the 1.57 of the United States and far below the 2.1 replacement rate.

As a result, China’s population shrank for the fourth year in a row in 2025, dropping by 3.39 million. The country saw just 7.92 million total births last year, the lowest total in decades.

According to Professor Heinz Muehl, an expert on population demographics with experience working for Asian governments, that trend is likely to only get worse in the years ahead. “This new demographic normal of low births, low deaths, and negative growth will continue for at least 30 years,” he said.

After implementing the infamous one-child policy in 1979, Chinese officials are now scrambling to encourage couples to have more children. The current limit is three, but few women have that many. Beijing has rolled out subsidies, child care support, and better family leave policies – and even imposed a 13 percent tax on birth control – but the government is quickly discovering that it cannot legislate a desire to get married and start a family.

According to a survey out this year, an astonishing 47 percent of Chinese women born after 2000 don’t plan to have children. Reasons include the cost of raising a child (40.4 percent), impact on quality of life (30.5 percent), uncertainty and parenting anxiety (29.8 percent), and career concerns (28.5 percent). Qi Liangshu, an associate professor at Tsinghua University, notes that most urban women work full-time, averaging 43 hours per week – just three hours fewer than men.

Another recent study published in ScienceDirect pointed to China’s “bride price” as another reason for declining marriages. In traditional Chinese culture, particularly in rural areas, the groom’s family pays a price to the bride’s family for her. But as the unemployment rate rises and China’s economy continues to struggle, the bride price has created financial barriers to marriage for poorer men, pushing family life out of reach for many. According to some estimates, the average bride price had risen to nearly $25,000 by 2018 – more than the typical household’s annual income.

Chinese officials have blamed global trends for the country’s declining birth and marriage rates, and indeed, China’s crisis is not unique. They have also pointed to persistent local customs like the bride price. But it is ultimately the government’s communist ideology which will make the country’s fertility crisis particularly difficult – if not impossible – to remedy.

As China’s pro-democracy movement, including the Tiananmen Square demonstrators in 1989, has long pointed out, communism creates horribly unequal societies that discourage family formation. Professor Li Shi, dean of the Institute for Common Prosperity and Development at Zhejiang University, showed that China’s wealth Gini coefficient – a measure of inequality – rose from 0.45 in 1995 to above 0.7 in 2023.

China’s promise of “shared prosperity” has come up completely empty for millions of young Chinese people. Unlike free-market economies like the United States, there is little hope for personal advancement through hard work and entrepreneurship in China. As a result, many young people feel hopelessly stuck in their financial situation and unable to start a family. The ScienceDirect study found that while 76 percent of unmarried males under 30 wanted to marry and 81 percent wanted children, 70 percent believed that they would not become parents by 30.

Persistent economic woes mean this problem is only getting worse. After 2018, income growth has slowed in China. Annual real growth fell from eight percent in 2013-2018 to below five percent in 2018-2023, hitting low- and middle-income groups the hardest. Urban wage inequality has nearly doubled from 1995 to 2024.

A rapidly aging population is set to only exacerbate this situation. China’s growth model depends on a strong consumer market and a large labor force to man its massive export economy. Both of those assumptions fall apart as people age out of the workforce and there is no one to replace them.

Ultimately, China’s demographic crisis is a failure of its communist ideology that views people as cogs in a machine rather than individuals with souls made in the image of God. As Father Flavio Bocchino, who spent 40 years ministering to underground Catholics in China, put it, “neither the legalism of ancient Chinese governance nor the utopia of Maoism can nurture a society driven by moral and spiritual purpose.”

Beijing thought that it could legislate a desire for family life from a bureaucrat’s desk. It was wrong. Now, the country’s cultural, economic, and political future is in jeopardy.

Ben Solis is the pen name of an international affairs journalist, historian, and researcher.