Is demographic decline reversible?

China has just announced that births in 2025 plunged to 7.92 million, from 9.54 million the previous year, and almost half of what was projected (14.33 million) when the one-child policy was repealed in 2016.

- Yi Fuxian

In fact, China’s births have fallen to a level comparable to that of 1738, when the country’s total population was only about 150 million.Having finally acknowledged the country’s grim demographic reality, Chinese authorities introduced new pro-natalist policies last year, expecting the number of births to rebound. But the decline in the fertility rate was inevitable, like a boulder rolling down a hill. Even if it can be pushed back uphill, it will not happen quickly.

After all, the downward trend in marriages will be difficult to reverse, since the number of women aged 20-34 — the group responsible for 85% of Chinese births — is expected to drop from 105 million in 2025 to 58 million by 2050. Compounding the problem, China's marriage market suffers from a pronounced mismatch. Decades of sex-selective abortion have created a severe shortage of women of childbearing age, and women’s higher educational attainment has created a “leftover women” phenomenon, with female students outnumbering males. Whereas the male-to-female ratio among six-year-olds in 2010 was 119:100, by 2022, when this cohort entered college, the ratio in undergraduate admissions was only 59:100. As a result, more men are unable to find wives, and more women are likely to remain unmarried, given their preference for more highly educated husbands.

China’s current policies are a scaled-down version of Japan’s ineffective response to demographic decline. In Japan, fertility fell from 1.45 (far below the replacement rate of 2.1) in 2015 to 1.15 in 2024. With China facing even deeper structural demographic constraints, it is not surprising that its fertility rate has already fallen below Japan’s.