Demographic data released by China’s National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) on Monday revealed that in 2025, China’s population fell for a fourth consecutive year, and the annual birthrate plummeted below eight million, a record low. The news prompted a flurry of online comments and articles, and some censorship of the topic on social media platforms. The topic appears to have been muted on Weibo where, despite intense public interest, it was not even among the top 50 trending topics.
Chinese government efforts to halt the sliding birthrate have thus far proven ineffective, be they material aid such as expanded childcare subsidies, or ideologically driven pro-natalist propaganda campaigns, or moderately symbolic gestures such as ending the long-standing value-added tax (VAT) exemption for contraceptive drugs and products. Relative to GDP per capita, China remains one of the most expensive countries in the world (second only to South Korea) in which to raise children, with many other factors contributing to the demographic crunch: changing views about marriage and children, the high cost of housing and education, the prevalence of excessive overtime and “996” schedules, workplace discrimination against women, and imbalances in childcare duties.
At Reuters, Farah Master reported on the latest demographic statistics and what they bode for Chinese society and the Chinese economy:
The country’s population dropped by 3.39 million to 1.405 billion, a faster decline than 2024, while the total number of births dropped to 7.92 million in 2025, down 17% from 9.54 million in 2024. The number of deaths rose to 11.31 million from 10.93 million in 2024, figures from China’s National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) showed.
China’s birth rate dropped to 5.63 per 1,000 people.
Births in 2025 were "roughly the same level as in 1738, when China’s population was only about 150 million," said Yi Fuxian, a demographer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
[…] China has one of the lowest fertility rates in the world at around 1 birth per woman, well below the 2.1 replacement rate. Other East Asian economies including Taiwan, South Korea and Singapore have similarly low levels of fertility at around 1.1 births per woman. [Source]
Huizhong Wu of the Associated Press reported on the dilemma facing the Chinese government, that of trying to urge people to have more children after decades of one-child policy measures:
Monday’s statistics illustrate the stark demographic pressures faced by the country as it tries to pivot from a problem it is working hard to overcome: status as a nation with a growing but transitional economy that, as is often said, is “getting old before it gets rich.”
The number of new babies born was just 7.92 million in 2025, a decline of 1.62 million, or 17%, from the previous year. The latest birth numbers show that the slight tick upward in 2024 was not a lasting trend. Births declined for seven years in a row through 2023.
Most families cite the costs and pressure of raising a child in a highly competitive society as significant hurdles that now loom larger in the face of an economic downturn that has impacted households struggling to meet their living costs.
[…] For decades, the Chinese government barred people from having more than one baby and often sanctioned those who did — a policy that produced more than two generations of only children. In 2015, the government raised the permitted [number] of offspring to two and then, facing demographic pressure, further revised the limit to three in 2021. [Source]
CDT Chinese editors noted that as of January 19, the birthrate decline did not even appear in Weibo’s top 50 trending topics list, despite considerable public interest in the topic. Among the top five Weibo trending topics that day were news about “China’s GDP exceeding 140 trillion yuan” and “China’s 5% GDP growth in 2025,” as well as a People’s Daily commentary on U.S. poverty and the “kill line” [a video-gaming term that has been repurposed by some Chinese internet commentators to describe the tenuous line between life and death for Americans who are unemployed, unhoused, or uninsured.] Teacher Li’s X account (@李老师不是你老师) noted that the topics “birth rate falls below 8 million” and "7.92 million births in 2025" were blocked by Weibo. Some related posts were also deleted by the Q&A site Zhihu, and CCTV.com began filtering online comments about the demographic report after its comment section was filled with sarcastic comments from netizens.
CDT has archived six recent WeChat articles on the birthrate topic, of which three appear to have been censored. The first, from WeChat blogger Yi Luo, discusses a January 2026 report from Chen Songxi and other demographers on Chinese population forecasts and policy recommendations for 2025-2100. Another deleted article, from WeChat humanities blogger Su Ze, revisits demographer and China Population Association president Zhai Zhenwu’s 2014 prediction that relaxing the two-child policy would lead to a baby boom, and the reasons why Zhai’s prediction failed to materialize. Su Ze enumerates the faults of Zhai’s analysis: relying on outdated or flawed survey material; failing to take into account external factors such as the high cost of living and the expense of raising and educating children; and overestimating the effectiveness of government policy in shaping reproductive decisions. Lastly, a now-censored article from WeChat account Jin Cen He Xi examines the birthrate decline in light of China’s skewed male-female birth ratio, in which men outnumber women by 10% or more, depending on the region, due to the practice of sex-selective abortion and a preference for male offspring.
CDT has compiled and translated some user reactions from Bilibili and Weibo about the latest birthrate data. Some commenters questioned the veracity of the statistics, and noted that the topic was being suppressed on Weibo, while others pointed to the many socio-economic factors that deter people from starting families. Others mocked and repurposed old government family-planning slogans to highlight the stark contrast between today’s pro-natalist rhetoric and decades of harsh enforcement of China’s “one-child policy”:
原上川: If they could have juked the stats to reach eight million, they would have, which goes to show that “7.92 million births” is already a significantly inflated figure.
氣水冻檸茶: Hilarious, they can’t even cook up a number that exceeds eight million anymore.
bili_76331469: When more grown-ups weep, fewer babies wail.
渔夫行: The birthrate is a direct reflection of the state of the economy and people’s level of happiness～
梦梦今天不休息: It’s not that we’re not having kids, we’re just postponing parenthood, slowing reproduction, and reproducing in an orderly fashion. Let each reproduce according to their abilities and means, and let some of the people become parents first, thus paving the way for others to become parents later, with the ultimate aim of achieving universal common fertility. At the same time, we must take into account our specific circumstances when reproducing, and we should not reproduce blindly: we must reproduce precisely, scientifically, efficiently, and strategically. Incorporate high-tech productive forces into the reproductive process, allow those with managerial skills to lead the reproductive charge, and facilitate reproduction by harnessing our considerable reserves of professional expertise.
我不信这昵称都能被占用: Fast forward to a "Hundred Days of Babies" campaign. [A reference to the infamous 1991 “Hundred Childless Days” campaign in two counties in Shandong Province, during which women at all stages of pregnancy were subjected to forced abortions to satisfy family-planning officials’ insistence that not a single child be born during the campaign. Because 1991 was the Year of the Ram/Sheep, it came to be known as “the slaughter of the lambs.”]
Double嘻: Weibo doesn’t even have a trending topic about this.
用户6258638334: Let’s turn our gaze instead to the “kill line” across the Pacific.
苏默依: Never mind the birthrate, how about we pay more attention to the adults whose lives are so miserable they want to die, okay?
狒狒的烦恼之路: IIRC, this is the lowest number of annual births since the founding of the PRC.
休问年华: If “producing the next generation” is our social obligation, then society should foot the cost of raising them; but if reproduction is a personal choice, then please respect our freedom to choose.
0小石头o: Wait, isn’t this good news? It means there are still 7.92 million couples who can comfortably afford to raise kids.
諀: The cost of raising kids has become totally unmoored from what people actually earn.
世界上肯定会觉得好的: It’s hard enough trying to support ourselves, how are we supposed to raise kids? [Chinese]
