China is facing a demographic bomb— and it could handcuff Beijing’s ambitions

Last week, Beijing’s release of China’s national birth count for 2025 left demographers stunned.

The national birth total plummeted by over 17% from 2024 to 2025, the PRC disclosed.

That sort of precipitous drop is almost never seen in stable modern societies, where births tend to inch up or down from one year to the next.

A decline of this magnitude qualifies as a demographic shock of the sort typically associated with dire calamities like famine or plague — a sign that a disaster or convulsion is taking place.

And these are only the latest readings from the astonishing birth crash that’s commenced under Xi Jinping’s rule: a drop by over half in just eight years that shows no sign as yet of abating.

Tumbling birth rates have already thrown China into depopulation, with over four deaths for every three births in 2025.

With fewer than 8 million new babies in 2025, China is not only down to the lowest level of natality since the Communists took power in 1949.

It’s actually back to birth levels last seen three centuries ago, in the early 1700s, when the national population may have been no more than 225 million — less than a sixth of China’s current 1.4 billion.

It’s a bitter irony for a regime that enforced a coercive one-child policy for 35 years, until 2015: The new birth figures imply that the total fertility rate has finally fallen below one birth per woman, just as the central planners wanted.

If this continues, the next generation of Chinese will be only be 44% as large as their parents’ cohort — and the following generation will be smaller still.

The Chinese Communist Party has long believed that the regime’s population planners can “fine-tune” birth totals, as if by animal husbandry.

But China is not “Animal Farm,” and the Chinese are not animals.

Almost as soon as the regime suspended the one-child policy, summoning the masses to breed more, China’s birth rates collapsed — as did new marriage registrations.

And since birth and marriage are tightly connected in China — out-of-wedlock childbearing remains highly stigmatized — Beijing now confronts a structural problem.

Regime leaders don’t yet seem to understand that it’s much easier for a police state to force birth rates down with bayonets than to coax births back up.

Laughable half-measures — like a new move to tax condoms — can promise nothing demographically.

These demographic trends speak to major vulnerabilities for China’s ambitious Communist state, signaling an ominous turn toward pessimism on the part of its young adults.

Other forms of protest can be policed and suppressed under a totalitarian dictatorship, but the plunge in births and marriages registers the strongest possible popular vote of “no confidence” in Xi’s vision of a “rising China.”

It’s hardly the only manifestation of China’s gloomy national mood; the “lying flat” and “let it rot” fads embracing social and workplace passivity were both attacked forcefully by CCP censors, to no effect.

It’s an unsettling echo of the despair that infected the USSR in the late Soviet era.

Further, China’s fertility collapse constrains CCP prospects for expanding its power worldwide.

The unforgiving consequences of super-low fertility today will gradually but inescapably tighten a strategic straitjacket on economic and military options for “China 2049” — the 100th anniversary of Communist power, and the year when Beijing envisions the dawn of its global mastery.

The trend means a smaller and even grayer future China than current projections estimate, with an even more rapidly shrinking labor force.

Yet lower-than-expected “headcount” numbers only scratch the surface of the social problems posed by the coming implosion of the Chinese family.

For millennia, the extended family has provided the social glue allowing China’s people to withstand bad rulers, and to prosper under good ones.

Today’s severe birth crash means that singleton children beget singleton children, producing a new and unfamiliar family type — one without siblings, cousins, uncles or aunts.

Something has to fill that kin-less void, and those prospects are inauspicious for the regime.

As the extended family — China’s social safety net throughout the ages — withers away, an aging, shrinking China will likely need a new, and very expensive, welfare state to provide for its immense senior population.

Every renminbi allocated to pensions and health care for the elderly will mean less money for global projects and the military.

The military itself, moreover, will likely be comprised almost entirely of only children — and therefore prone to an extreme form of casualty aversion.

In China’s deep-rooted Confucian tradition, the extinction of a family lineage is a matter of existential dread.

Will a future People’s Liberation Army really contemplate an invasion of Taiwan if it would visit such a disaster on millions of Chinese families — with unpredictable repercussions for the regime itself?

Birth collapse and the implosion of family structure may be limiting the CCP’s future choices in ways that neither Beijing nor Washington have yet considered.

Nicholas Eberstadt holds the Henry Wendt Chair in Political Economy at the American Enterprise Institute.