Millions of people across China celebrated the final Lunar New Year break with food, festivities and prayers.
But for some single adults it was a difficult time, as their parents berated them for days for not getting married or having children.
The lack of children has long been a hot topic in China (and elsewhere in East Asia) and is now a major concern for authorities.
In January, the issue returned to the headlines when the government released figures showing the country’s birth rate had fallen to a new low.
It was an unwanted record (5.63 births per 1,000 people is the lowest level since the creation of the Accepted Republic in 1949) and one that Chinese authorities did not see coming.
Data from the National Bureau of Statistics from January shows that China recorded just 7.92 million births in 2025. And there were more deaths than births for the fourth year in a row, meaning the total population fell by almost 3.4 million.
United Nations experts believe China’s population will continue to decline and estimate that the country will lose more than half of its existing population by the end of the century.
However, two decades ago the picture looked very different. Chinese authorities had predicted that the population would continue to grow until 2033 and would reach 1.5 billion people. But the peak came 12 years earlier, with nearly 100 million fewer people than those projections.
How did Chinese planners get their forecasts for the world’s most populous nation so wrong?
Betting on a “baby enhancement”
In the late 1970s, as China’s population approached one billion, the government began to worry about the effect this would have on its ambitious economic growth plans.
In 1979, Deng Xiaoping’s government established a limit of only one child per family.
This policy was generally implemented through financial and employment incentives for those who complied, broad access to contraceptives, and fines for those who violated the rules.
More coercive measures, such as forced abortions and mass sterilizations, were also sometimes used.
The policy certainly achieved its initial goals – the Chinese government estimates that it prevented some 400 million births in total (although this figure is disputed) – but it also profoundly affected the intergenerational balance.
Another concern gradually gained weight: that the aging population would slow down the economy as the young population declined and the ratio between working adults contributing to the pension system, on the one hand, and retirees, on the other, continued to fall.
For years, China’s population planners assumed that the low birth rate was temporary and that, once the limits were lifted, couples would quickly decide to have more children.
A major 2007 population strategy report, drawn up by more than 300 experts, argued that the low fertility rate could soar once caps were removed and warned against relaxing birth control policies too quickly, even when birth rates were falling.
However, when the two-child policy was introduced in 2016, a sustained increase in birth rates was not observed. The three-child policy announced in 2021 also did not have much of an impact.
“Constant decline”
According to Kerry Brown, professor of Chinese Studies and director of the Lao-China Institute at King’s College London, China was already experiencing a sustained decline in fertility long before the introduction of the one-child policy.
“The birth rate in China has declined due to natural causes since the early 1970s; the peak of population growth in terms of children per family occurred in the 1950s and 1960s,” he explains to the BBC.
Brown believes that, starting in the 1980s, more and more families decided to have only one or two children for various economic and other reasons, regardless of the one-child policy.
“I don’t think the party has really understood how difficult it is for families to support their children financially and the priority they place on doing it well or not doing it at all.”
“We have seen similar changes in other parts of the world, but in China this has happened very quickly,” he adds.
Professor Brown believes the Chinese government was “blindsided” by the speed of social and economic change, as the effects of policies to address demographics often unfold over decades, but an economy can change radically in just months or years.
Gender imbalance
The one-child policy has also had a profound impact on the Chinese population in terms of gender.
In some cases, parents, knowing that they could only count on one child to support them in their old age, aborted female fetuses.
That skewed the ratio of men to women, and led to a “bachelor crisis,” as tens of millions of “surplus” men found themselves unable to find wives.
Especially men without a college education had serious difficulties, as the expansion of access to higher education transformed the marriage market and many more women than men went to college.
“This led to a phenomenon called ‘bare branch men’, a metaphor for men who were unable to find a partner,” explains Professor Brown, adding that the term comes from the understanding that their branches would not bear fruit (children) and is similar to the “incel” movement in the West.
On the other hand, highly educated women increasingly chose to marry later or not at all.
In an attempt to encourage these women to marry, Chinese state media began referring to them disparagingly as “sheng nu” or “leftover women.”
“It is a very derogatory term: it refers to women who suffer age discrimination for not having married and for prioritizing their professional career over marriage and raising a family,” says Brown.
By 2023, the proportion of single women aged 25 to 29 had risen to 43%, reducing the window of fertile years and birth rates.
Baby bonuses
The Beijing government introduced various measures to stop the decline in birth rates, including financial incentives of 3,600 yuan (US$500) for each child under three years of age.
Some decisions have generated controversy. For example, this year’s 13% tax on contraceptives – including condoms, birth control pills and other devices – is raising concerns about possible unwanted pregnancies and a rise in HIV cases.
Incentives have been ineffective in changing behavior, with many young Chinese citing the cost of raising children as a reason for not having them.
Millie (not her real name), from Beijing, is an air traffic controller. She and her husband had their first child 10 years ago.
The young woman told the BBC that she previously wanted to have a second child, but changed her mind.
“During the pandemic, neither my mother nor my mother-in-law could come help me. My husband traveled frequently for business and I was in charge of taking my son to and from school and monitoring his homework.”
Millie says her boss was understanding and allowed her to adjust her shifts, but she’s hesitant to ask for that preferential treatment again.
“I am a full-time employee and I am paid to work these hours. There is an unspoken rule: family life should not interfere with work obligations,” she said.
“I definitely won’t have another child. It’s not good for my body, it will be difficult to take care of two children and no one will help me cope with the load.”
Li Hongfei (not his real name) runs a video production company in Chongqing, southwest China.
He remembers how his family used to hide his younger brother from authorities in the 1980s.
Li is already over 40 years old. He has been married for ten years and had a daughter during the pandemic.
The couple has thought about having a second child, but feels the financial pressure.
“My profits have been decreasing, but the cost of running the office has not gone down. My daughter’s school tuition is going up. My savings are running out.”
“We want our daughter to have a brother or sister, but this seems more and more doubtless.”
Professor Brown is not surprised that China’s efforts to change the demographic trend have not yet been successful. “The government has launched campaigns about the patriotic importance of having children, but I don’t think people really listen to them,” she says.
“Ultimately, what the government can do is very limited; it can’t force people to have children.”
What does this mean for China and the world?
At about one birth per woman, China has one of the lowest birth rates in the world, well below the 2.1 replacement rate that would keep its population size stable.
The population decline has economic and social implications for the world’s second-largest economy, as it reduces the workforce and weakens consumer demand.
And the decline of China’s population could have a domino effect on the global economy, causing prices to rise in other countries around the world.
Other economies in the region and beyond have similarly low birth rates but are much richer per capita, giving their governments greater scope to manage the imbalance of aging populations.
The danger for China is that it is getting older before it gets richer.
“In almost the entire region the population is declining and aging. This is most critical in places like Japan and Taiwan, but the scale of change in China is definitely the greatest,” says Professor Brown.
“In terms of social welfare and other ways to mitigate population aging and care for the elderly, China still does not have the necessary levels of wealth,” he warns.
If, as the official Chinese Academy of Social Sciences believes, the pension fund is running out, the country could be running out of time to generate enough funds to care for its growing elderly population.
However, Professor Brown is cautiously optimistic that China will solve its population problems in time.
“They will probably try to use technology and have all kinds of political tools to alleviate these problems,” he says.
“I think people are often pessimistic about China’s ability to do things, but then China finds a way.”
This text was originally published by the BBC Chinese Service, with additional reporting by Kelly Ng, Silvia Chang and Britt Yip, and editing by Mark Shea and Su-min Hwang.
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