Could China’s Fertility Crisis Be Its Undoing?

Most of the developed world is facing a potentially catastrophic fertility crisis, but that problem is particularly pronounced in China, where birth rates continue to collapse a decade after the end of Beijing’s “one-child” policy. While some economists believe that China could be on course to overtake the United States as the world’s dominant economy, falling population numbers are likely to derail those predictions.

For the fourth year in a row, China reported more deaths than births in 2025, with deaths rising to 11.31 million and overall births plunging from 9.54 million in 2024 to 7.92 million in 2025. That’s an astonishingly low number for a country of a reported 1.41 billion people (although analysts have long alleged that Beijing inflates that figure).

Overall, China saw 5.63 births per 1,000 people last year – just over half the 10.52 births per 1,000 people in the United States. Although the U.S. fertility rate is still a highly alarming 1.6 births per woman, well below the replacement rate of 2.1, China’s is a miserable 1.0 – an extinction-level figure. (For reference, the global fertility rate is now an estimated 2.2-2.3, down sharply from 5.0 in 1950.)

As a result of this trend, China lost its status as the world’s most populous country in 2023, with India surging past the communist nation and crossing 1.45 billion people in 2024.

Chinese leaders are desperately trying to slow this spiral, declaring childbirth a patriotic act, subsidizing housing for couples, pressuring newlyweds about family planning, and even taxing birth control. The Chinese government is also offering nationwide cash subsidies of about $500 per year for every child under three, extending maternity leave, providing tax deductions for childcare, and offering subsidies for purchasing or renting homes.

But none of those efforts appear to be having much effect. Now, the fertility rate has fallen so sharply that some experts believe a looming population collapse is inevitable.

The problems with such a collapse are obvious. Fewer babies means fewer workers to support an aging population, and lower productivity for a country whose economy relies heavily on exports. Once an inflection point is crossed, the decline becomes exponential.

To understand how China arrived at this point, one must begin with the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) own social engineering campaign. The “one-child” policy, imposed in 1979 and ruthlessly enforced for more than three decades, stands as one of the most disastrous demographic experiments in human history.

In its effort to accelerate economic growth and prevent overpopulation, Beijing effectively propagandized an entire society against childbearing. Families were fined, coerced, and in some cases subjected to forced abortions and sterilizations. An entire generation grew up internalizing the message that children were a burden to national development, rather than the foundation of it.

Dr. Marangoz Güllü, a Turkish historian and former diplomat in China, argued that the one-child policy was profoundly damaging, describing it as a “death sentence” for the nation. He asserted that this policy erased a generation and made rejuvenation – as Chinese President Xi Jinping promotes – unrealistic. Dr. Güllü estimated it would take several decades for China to recover.

Téngyuán Shuǐ, a former official with the Central Financial and Economic Affairs Commission – a CCP body that oversees the Finance Ministry and shapes economic policy – observed, “The Party ridiculed the institution of marriage for decades.” After fleeing China in the late 1990s and converting to Catholicism, Téngyuán reflected, “To paraphrase Proverbs, the Party’s perverse tongue has crushed China’s spirit. Now, the Party faces its judgment day.”

Indeed, what makes the current panic in Beijing so striking is the element of self-infliction. For decades, the Party treated fertility as a problem to be solved. Now it is shocking to discover that attitudes shaped over an entire generation cannot be reversed by decree. A population taught that prosperity depends on smaller families will not suddenly embrace large ones because the CCP Central Committee has changed its mind.

Compounding this cultural shift is a harsh economic reality. Raising a child in modern China is exorbitantly expensive, especially in urban centers where most young professionals live. The cost of raising a child through high school ranges from roughly $65,000 in less affluent regions such as Xinjiang to more than $130,000 in cities like Shanghai or Beijing.

Extending that cost to young adulthood amounts to 6.3 percent of GDP per capita – the second-highest among 14 countries in one survey, trailing only South Korea at 7.8 percent. In a stagnating economy plagued by youth unemployment and a deflating real estate sector, many couples simply conclude that they cannot afford parenthood.

There is also a deeper ideological irony at work. China remains committed to communism, and the Communist Manifesto – one of the regime’s foundational texts – calls for the abolition of the family as a bourgeois institution. While the CCP has long tempered such rhetoric to accommodate practical realities, it has never fully abandoned its suspicion of traditional family structures.

When a regime spends decades subordinating family life to the state, it should not be surprised when family formation weakens. In that sense, the fertility collapse is not merely an economic or demographic accident; it is a philosophical consequence.

The implications of this demographic unraveling are profound. China’s economic rise has depended on a vast, disciplined labor force powering export-driven growth. A shrinking working-age population will inevitably constrain manufacturing capacity, strain public finances, and undermine Beijing’s ambitions for technological supremacy. Meanwhile, the elderly share of the population is soaring, increasing the burden on social services and pensions in a country without the kind of robust welfare state seen in parts of Europe.

There are also strategic consequences. Military power ultimately rests on demographics. A nation with fewer young people will struggle to sustain large standing forces or absorb casualties in a prolonged conflict. China’s leaders have invested heavily in modernizing the People’s Liberation Army, but advanced hardware cannot substitute indefinitely for manpower and morale. An aging society is less risk-tolerant and less able to mobilize for sustained confrontation.

To be sure, the United States and much of the West face their own fertility challenges. But there are tentative signs that birth rates in some Western countries may be stabilizing, aided by cultural renewal movements and more flexible labor markets. The United States, with its tradition of immigration and comparatively higher fertility rate, retains demographic advantages that China lacks. If those trends hold, they could significantly shape the balance of power in the coming decades.

For years, analysts predicted that China’s economic trajectory would inevitably eclipse America’s. Demography now casts serious doubt on that assumption. A nation cannot indefinitely outproduce, out-innovate, or outfight its rivals while its population shrinks and ages at record speed.

In that sense, China’s fertility crisis may represent more than a social problem. It may be the quiet undoing of Beijing’s grand ambitions – a reminder that no amount of central planning can override the fundamental human institutions on which civilization depends.

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