China’s population has fallen for the fourth year in a row despite efforts by the government to persuade couples to have more children.

 

Official figures released on Monday revealed that the world’s second-most populous nation shrank in 2025, with the total population to 1.404billion, around three million fewer people than the year before.

 

 

A decade after ending China’s longtime one-child policy, the country’s authorities have been pushing a range of ideas and policies to try to encourage more births, tactics that range from cash subsidies to taxing condoms to eliminating a tax on matchmakers and day care centers.

 

 

 

‘China’s one-child policy will be remembered as one of the costliest lessons of misguided public policymaking,’ the Brookings Institution said in a 2016 report shortly after the policy was abolished.

 

 

 

 

Birth rates have now slumped to their lowest level since the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, when Mao Zedong’s Communists seized power.

 

 

 

 

Just 5.63 births were recorded per 1,000 people in 2025 – the weakest figure on record – and only 7.92million babies were born last year, a dramatic fall of 1.62million, or 17 per cent, compared with 2024.

 

 

 

That drop wiped out a brief and fragile uptick seen the year before, confirming that China’s long-term decline in births remains firmly entrenched after seven consecutive years of falling numbers through 2023.

 

 

 

Once the world’s most populous country, China was taken over by regional rival India in 2023.

 

 

 

Families cite the high cost of living, intense academic pressure, and the expense of raising children in a fiercely competitive society as reasons for delaying or avoiding parenthood.

 

 

 

As one expert put it: ‘It’s these big structural issues which are much harder to tackle, whether it’s housing, and work and getting a job and getting started in life and expectations around education… It’s gonna be difficult to make a major change in those number of births until those are addressed.’