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China’s population falls again as birthrate drops 17% to record low

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Tuesday, 20 January, 2026, 00:47
China’s population falls again as birthrate drops 17% to record low

China’s population fell for a fourth consecutive year in 2025 as the birthrate plunged to another record low despite the introduction of polices aimed at encouraging people to have children.

Registered births dropped to 7.92 million in 2025 – or 5.63 for every 1,000 members of the population – down 17% from 9.54 million in 2024, and the lowest since records began in 1949.
The population dropped by 3.39 million to 1.405 billion, a faster fall than 2024, while deaths rose to 11.31 million from 10.93 million in 2024, figures from China’s National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) revealed.

Yi Fuxian, a demographer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said births in 2025 were “roughly the same level as in 1738, when China’s population was only about 150 million”.

The fall comes despite years of policies from Beijing intended to boost the flagging birthrate. This year, the government allocated 90bn yuan (£9.65bn) for its first nationwide childcare subsidy programme, for children aged under three. There are also plans to expand national healthcare insurance to cover all childbirth related expenses, including IVF treatment.

But young people still feel that it is too expensive to have children, especially in a time of high unemployment and slowing economic growth. “Given the current environment, it is a miracle that anyone is willing to have kids at all,” wrote one Weibo user.

The average cost of raising a child in China until the age of 18 is 538,000 yuan – more than 6.3 times as high as its GDP per capita, compared with 4.11 times in the US or 4.26 times in Japan, according to a Chinese population research thinktank. The cost is even higher in Chinese cities.

Decades of a one-child policy mean that the current generation of adults who are at child-bearing age are socially conditioned to favour single-child households. The effects of the policy, which was lifted in 2017, mean that the pool of people of child-bearing age is also shrinking, as China’s population rapidly ages.