The Chinese government’s flurry of pro-natal policies has been credited with ending last year’s seven-year birth rate decline, but some analysts caution this will prove to be the exception rather than the rule.
Newsweek reached out to the Chinese Foreign Ministry with a request for comment by email.
Why It Matters
Last year marked the end of a seven-year streak of declining births in China, according to the country’s statistics bureau on Friday. However, the overall population continued to decrease for the third consecutive year, with the proportion of elderly citizens steadily rising.
Chinese policymakers are increasingly concerned that the falling birth rate will weigh heavily on the country’s struggling economy. In response, they have rolled out a flurry of pro-natal policy changes in recent years, including the end of the decades-old one-child policy. Yet the fertility rate has fallen to levels far below the 2.1 births per woman needed to sustain population replacement.
What To Know
China’s birth rate rose slightly to 6.77 per 1,000 people last year, up from 6.39 in 2023, according to the statistics bureau.
Xiujian Peng, senior research fellow at the Centre of Policy Studies at Australia’s Victoria University, attributed this uptick to the Chinese zodiac calendar, noting that 2024 was the Year of the Dragon, traditionally considered an auspicious year to have a child—a cultural phenomenon, rather than an indicator of policy success.
Aaron Favila,/Associated Press
“This is due to population momentum, a dynamic that has been in motion since the total fertility rate fell below the replacement level in the 1990s. This long-term trend of population decline is expected to persist for many years in China,” Peng said.
Although the modest rise aligns with most scholars’ expectations, Peng expressed skepticism about the trend. “I don’t think the positive trend will hold.” she added.
Peng also pointed to China’s falling marriage rate, which is closely correlated with childbirth. Official statistics revealed that only 4.75 million marriages were registered in the third quarter of 2023—a 16.6 percent decline from the same period the previous year. Peng expects this trend to persist into 2025.
Other factors, such as the rising cost of living and education, and high unemployment among Gen Z, are likely to contribute to the long-term decline in births, Peng added.
What People Are Saying
Yuan Xin, professor at Nankai University’s School of Economics, told China Daily:
“Because the number of women of childbearing age is shrinking, the number of babies born each year will be limited regardless of whether the fertility rate (the average number of babies born to a woman of reproductive age) rises or not.”
Wang Pingping, director-general of the National Bureau of Statistics’ Department of Population and Employment Statistics said: “It should also be noted that women of childbearing age, especially women of childbearing age in the prime of childbearing, are still decreasing, which still has an impact on the population born in China’s next stage.”
What’s Next?
China is steadily progressing toward what the United Nations classifies as a “super-aged society.”
The U.N. projects that by 2040, China’s working-age population (14 to 64 years old) will shrink from 70 percent to 64 percent, while the proportion of citizens over 65 will rise to 27 percent, up from 15 percent in 2025.
To prepare for this demographic shift, China has begun phasing in higher statutory retirement ages, a move that has added to many younger citizens’ anxieties over the future.
