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Eighty years of communist rule has certainly left its mark on China, in some of the most appalling ways. Forget the glittering cities of CCP propaganda. From upwards of 70 million Chinese murdered, to the wanton destruction of an estimated three-quarters of the nation’s rich cultural legacy, communism has blighted generations of Chinese.
And will continue to do so for generations unborn – who will mostly remain unborn.
China’s population has shrunk for the fourth straight year as birthrates hit a record low, national data shows.
In 2025, the population shrank by 0.24 per cent, or 3.39 million people, with experts predicting further decline.
Between 2024 and 2025, the number of births dropped by 17 per cent – from 9.54 million to 7.92 million, figures from China’s National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) showed.
That was the lowest birth rate since records began in 1949, the year the People’s Republic of China was founded.
Couple that with an enduring preference for male children and sex-selective abortion, the upshot is that China is rapidly, as Mark Steyn said, growing very old and very male. Hence, for all Xi Jinping’s aggressive posturing, unless the country plans on being the first gay superpower since Sparta, China’s decline is set in stone.
By 2035 the number of over-60s is set to hit 400 million, roughly equal to the populations of the United States and Italy combined, meaning hundreds of millions of people are set to leave the workforce at a time when pension budgets are already stretched.
Despite a raft of policies to reverse a shrinking population, it has continued to decline since 2022, complicating Beijing’s plan to boost domestic consumption and reduce debt.
And once again putting paid to the socialist conceit of an all-powerful state wisely shepherding the economy wherever it plans.
[Feng Chongyi, an associate professor in China studies at the University of Technology Sydney] said the decline was the result of deep structural issues within the population, a legacy of the one-child policy.
“That policy not only reduced the overall number of births but also caused a serious gender imbalance,” he said.
Not only were there fewer people of child-bearing age than before, there was also a long-standing preference for boys, especially in rural populations, leading to more men than women, he added.
The second structural problem was that China’s economic growth had reached its ceiling, especially for young people.
“High housing costs, heavy household debt, limited consumption power and weak income growth have eroded confidence,” he said.
As communists will, the CCP is deluding itself it can ‘plan’ its way out of the demographic sinkhole it’s created.
In 2016, China scrapped the one-child policy that, for 27 years, forbade families from having more than one child.
It also introduced the three-child policy in 2021, allowing families to have up to three children.
Last May, couples were also allowed to marry anywhere in China instead of where they lived.
They’re also throwing tens of billions of other people’s money down the hole.
Key costs include the national child subsidy, introduced in 2024, and a pledge that pregnant women in 2026 will not be “out of pocket” and have all medical costs, including in vitro fertilisation (IVF), fully covered.
A nationwide childcare subsidy policy came into force on January 1, which offers parents the equivalent of about $745 annually per child under the age of three.
Fees for public kindergartens were also waived from last autumn.
This year the government also removed tax exemptions for condoms and contraceptive pills, which could make these methods of birth control up to 13 per cent more expensive.
And none of it’s working.
In fact, it’s already too late.
Xiujian Peng, senior research fellow at the Centre of Policy Studies at Victoria University, said […]
“These policies may stop the further decline of births or slightly increase the births number, but they can not change China’s population decline trend,” she said.
“Even if China’s government could reverse the fertility decline immediately and increase its total fertility rate to a replacement level of 2-1, it will still take around 70 years for China’s population to increase again.”
Wait a minute: a monocultural society with an ageing population and a collapsing birthrate?
Has anyone suggested mass immigration?
