China has recorded its lowest number of births since the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949, with only 7.29 million newborns in 2025, a dramatic 17% drop from 2024. The decline underscores the failure of Beijing’s attempts to reverse decades of demographic damage from the one-child policy to aggressive pro-natalist campaigns and highlights a growing population crisis that conservatives warn could undermine the Communist Party’s long-term economic and military plans.
This marks the third consecutive year of population decline, with deaths outpacing births and fertility rates hovering around 1.0–1.1 children per woman, far below the 2.1 replacement level needed for stability. Despite scrapping the one-child policy in 2016, then expanding to three children in 2021, and pumping billions into subsidies and incentives, the response has been weak. Young Chinese cite skyrocketing housing costs, high unemployment, grueling work culture, and uncertainty about the future as reasons to delay or forgo having children.
The collapse has far-reaching implications. A shrinking, aging population threatens China’s labor force, economic growth, and ability to maintain a massive standing army, while increasing pressures on pensions and healthcare. Analysts warn that without a workforce capable of sustaining its industrial and military ambitions, Xi Jinping’s vision of global dominance may face serious limits. Conservatives see the trend as proof that authoritarian overreach, especially policies that undermine families, can create long-term strategic vulnerabilities, no matter how powerful the state appears on the world stage.
Further compounding the crisis is the societal impact of decades of restrictive family policies. Skewed gender ratios, declining marriage rates, and a generational aversion to parenthood have created social and cultural headwinds that money alone cannot fix. Beijing’s efforts to reverse the trend, ranging from housing subsidies for new parents to free fertility treatments may simply be too little, too late.
For the global community, China’s demographic decline represents a shift in strategic calculations. A smaller, older population may limit the country’s capacity to sustain economic expansion, maintain technological competitiveness, or project military power abroad. Conservatives argue that the demographic crunch serves as a stark reminder that even the most tightly controlled authoritarian systems are vulnerable to long-term structural weaknesses, and that Xi’s ambitions for superpower dominance may collide with reality in the years ahead.
