China Recorded the Lowest Birth Rate in 2025: A Look at the Factors Behind the Decline
Udumbara
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Commentary
According to data from China’s National Bureau of Statistics, only 7.92 million births were recorded in 2025—the lowest figure since 1949 (12.75 million). That is nearly 10 million fewer births than in 2016 (17.86 million). The plunging birth rate signals that China’s demographic crisis has reached an unprecedented level.
A Grave Mistake Driven by CCP Leaders
Looking back, the CCP’s mandatory family planning policy was fundamentally wrong from the start.The CCP began implementing birth control in the early 1970s, without any strict one-child limit at first. The CCP’s birth control slogan then was “One is not too few, two is just right, three is too many.” Despite that, China’s total fertility rate—average number of children a woman would have in her lifetime—dropped sharply from 5.71 in 1970 to 2.24 by 1980, already nearing the internationally recognized replacement fertility rate of 2.1.
Nobel Prize-winning economist Gary Becker argued that, even without policy interventions, China’s fertility would have fallen sharply after 1981, owing to rising incomes, improved education, and rapid urbanization.
So why the sudden, extreme shift in 1980, when the regime used brutal force to slash birth rates? The blame lies with Deng Xiaoping, who regained power after the Cultural Revolution.
Deng set an ambitious target: to quadruple per capita gross national product between 1981 and 2000, reaching $1,000 and achieving “moderate prosperity” or “xiaokang.” To reach that goal, China’s population had to be tightly controlled, so the one-child rule was created. From a policy standpoint, this was absurd.
Ordinary people resisted fiercely, but under Deng, the regime suppressed the opposition and enforced its policies nonetheless. Across China, violent slogans appeared everywhere, including “Better to let blood flow into rivers than allow one extra birth!” and “After the first child: insert an IUD; after the second: sterilize; after the third or fourth: kill, kill, kill!”
Top Economists Criticize China’s Birth Control
The CCP has long boasted that its family planning policy helped fuel decades of “economic miracle” after reform and opening up—claiming it prevented more than 400 million births and eased a huge burden.Many experts disagree. They argue that China’s abundant labor force has created a key demographic dividend that drives growth, whereas the long-term population crisis resulting from the one-child policy has dealt a devastating blow to the economy.
Ronald Coase, the 1991 Nobel Prize winner in economics, spoke bluntly in a 2013 interview with Chinese media portal NetEase Finance. “This is the strangest policy I’ve ever heard of. In fact, this policy has potentially devastating consequences,” he said.
“If [Beijing] keeps enforcing the one-child policy, China may eventually disappear.”
Gary Becker, the 1992 Nobel Economics laureate, said in 2013 that China’s one-child policy had turned into massive government social engineering, interfering in personal decisions. In addition, he said, it “has contributed to the rapid aging of the Chinese population,” which “is causing major problems in providing for adequate medical care and retirement income of the elderly.”
Ineffective Pro-Natal Policies
Faced with a deepening population crisis, the CCP has shifted from decades of controlling births and killing infants to now desperately urging people to have children. It rolled out a series of pro-birth measures: in 2016, it scrapped the one-child policy and encouraged two children; in 2021, it introduced the three-child policy. But whether it’s forcing one child or pushing for three, it’s still state-directed, top-down “planned fertility”—ordinary Chinese people still don’t have real reproductive freedom.Many of the new “pro-natal” rules have sparked widespread mockery and backlash for being bizarre. For example, starting Jan. 1, 2026, sales of contraceptives and related products will no longer be subject to the value-added tax exemption.
On top of that, cash-strapped local governments are clawing back birth subsidies that have already been paid. Netizens across Shanghai, Anhui, Hubei, Shanxi, Shaanxi, Zhejiang, Hunan, Yunnan, and other provinces have reported that authorities are halting second-child subsidies under the pretext of “merging them with childcare allowances.” Some regions are even demanding repayment of subsidies that have already been disbursed.
CCP Turns Blind Eye to One-Child Policy’s Lasting Damage
The Washington Post blasted the CCP’s family planning policy for the sharp fall of China’s birth rate, saying that “birth shocks of this order almost never occur under stable modern governments during peacetime. Swift and sharp fertility crashes instead usually reflect catastrophe: famine, war or other shattering upheavals.” This “reflect[s] a people’s deep pessimism.”What’s infuriating is that, to this day, the CCP still hasn’t fully lifted birth restrictions, publicly repudiated the one-child policy, or offered a single apology for the tragedies it inflicted on hundreds of millions of Chinese families.
In short, whether it was forcing couples to have only one child or now pressuring them to have three, the CCP has never treated ordinary Chinese people as human beings. The family planning policy is among the most heinous crimes committed against the Chinese people under CCP rule.
On this land ravaged by the communist regime, the collapse in birth rates can be seen as the people’s silent protest against the Party’s rule. It signals deep despair among mainland Chinese about any prospect of a hopeful future under CCP control.
