China’s population has experienced negative growth for the fourth consecutive year, as reported by the Chinese National Bureau of Statistics on January 19. In 2025, the number of births in China was 7.92 million, a decrease of approximately 17% from the 9.54 million births in 2024, resulting in a reduction of 1.62 million people, marking the lowest record since the Chinese Communist Party seized power in 1949.
The number of deaths in 2025 was 11.31 million, leading to a nationwide population decrease of 3.39 million compared to the previous year, highlighting a situation where deaths surpass births.
The current population structure is reminiscent of the early implementation of China’s so-called family planning policy by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
In the early 1950s, the CCP encouraged childbirth, following the example of the Soviet Union, promoting mothers who gave birth to five or ten children as “glorious mothers” and “heroic mothers,” leading to a rapid population increase in China. By the late 1970s, China’s population had neared 1 billion.
During the 1970s and 1980s, the CCP began advocating for birth control as they viewed the rapid population growth as a potential threat.
In September 1982, the CCP formulated the “family planning” policy, which was later enshrined in the constitution in December of the same year.
From the 1980s to the end of 2015, the CCP formally implemented the one-child policy, allowing exceptions for certain cases such as rural couples with only one daughter, couples where at least one spouse is an only child, and some ethnic minorities in autonomous regions and provinces to have two children.
According to the Associated Press, the one-child policy enforced by the CCP was the most stringent population control policy globally, with authorities in Beijing coercing women into having abortions, widespread sterilizations, and even leading to the selling or killing of baby girls.
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Mei Fong, author of “One Child: The Story of China’s Most Radical Experiment,” conducted in-depth investigations into forced abortions and human rights violations of families with more than one child under the one-child policy following the 2008 Sichuan earthquake.
Her research revealed that many local CCP governments resorted to setting up investigators, offering rewards for informants, and enforcing mandatory abortions for pregnant women found to be violating the one-child policy target numbers.
Author of “The Little Red Guard,” American journalist Barbara Demick, exposed a collective uprising in a southern county of Guangxi in 2007 where over 3,000 people stormed the family planning office, vandalizing and destroying offices and burning government vehicles in response to forced demolition due to a poor farmer’s inability to pay fines.
In 2012, a 22-year-old female worker named Feng Jianmei from Shaanxi, who was pregnant with her second child in the late stage of pregnancy, was forcibly taken by family planning officials to the hospital with a pillowcase over her head and compelled to undergo an induced abortion. In a heartbreaking photograph, Feng Jianmei is seen lying on a hospital bed in despair with disheveled hair, beside her a fetus that had formed but tragically died.
This image ignited a firestorm of public opinion online, with censorship authorities struggling to keep up as nearly a million comments flooded in demanding the prosecution of the family planning officials for murder. Eventually, the local government was compelled to issue an apology to the family.
In recent years, China has been faced with a shrinking labor force and rapid aging population. In 2015, the CCP lifted the one-child policy and implemented a two-child policy in 2016, further relaxing it to a three-child policy in 2021, but these measures have shown limited effectiveness.
Currently, the CCP has introduced a series of policies in an attempt to boost the birth rate, including removing tax incentives for condoms, providing cash subsidies to couples with children, and even tracking women’s menstrual cycles for childbirth incentives. However, reversing the decline in birth rates proves to be a challenging task.
“It’s hard to deny that China (CCP) has shot itself in the foot regarding its population structure,” remarked Mei Fong.