The number of newborns in China last year fell for the fourth consecutive year, dropping to the 7 million range and marking the lowest figure since the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949. Alongside the ongoing decline in births, the total population has also decreased for the fourth straight year.
According to Yonhap News Agency, the National Bureau of Statistics of China announced on January 19 that the annual number of newborns in China last year, excluding Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan, and overseas Chinese, was recorded at 7.92 million. The crude birth rate, which refers to the number of births per 1,000 people, stood at 5.63, also an all-time low.
The number of births last year plummeted by about 17% (1.62 million) compared to 9.54 million in 2024, entering the 7 million range for the first time. This is the lowest figure since the founding of the People's Republic of China.
China's annual number of births remained around 20 million until the 1950s, and surged to between 25 million and 29 million in the 1960s following the Great Leap Forward. However, the implementation of the one-child policy in the 1970s triggered a downward trend.
By the late 1990s, the annual number of births had dropped below 20 million, and in the 2000s, it hovered around 15 to 16 million. After the abolition of the one-child policy in 2016 and 2017, there was a temporary rebound to the 17 million range, but the sharp decline resumed thereafter. In 2022, the number of births fell to 9.56 million, dropping below the 10 million mark; it remained in the 9 million range until last year, when it failed to reach even 8 million.
In particular, 2024 saw a slight increase in births due to the "Year of the Dragon" effect, but this rebound was only temporary.
The number of deaths last year was 11.31 million, not much different from 10.93 million in 2024. As a result, China's total population decreased by 3.39 million year-on-year, reaching 1.40489 billion.
Since the statistics released in January 2023 for 2022, which showed the first population decline in 61 years, China's population has continued to shrink for four consecutive years.
The year 2026 will mark the 10th anniversary of the official abolition of the one-child policy in China. The Chinese government has been rolling out marriage and childbirth encouragement policies at both central and local levels, but reluctance among the younger generation to marry and have children remains unresolved due to economic slowdown and high youth unemployment rates.
Yi Fuxian, a Chinese population expert at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told the Financial Times (FT) that "the decline in China's birth rate is like a giant boulder rolling down a hill, making it difficult to reverse," adding that "the one-child policy has further accelerated this trend."
The aging trend is also pronounced. As of last year, the working-age population (aged 16 to 59) was 851.36 million, accounting for 60.6% of the total. This proportion has continued to decline, from 62.0% in 2022, to 61.3% in 2023, and 60.9% in 2024.
In contrast, the population aged 60 and above reached 323.38 million, accounting for 23.0% of the total, while those aged 65 and above numbered 223.65 million, or 15.9%. These figures represent increases of 1.0 percentage point and 0.3 percentage point, respectively, compared to the previous year.
By gender, the population consisted of 716.85 million men and 688.04 million women.
Urbanization also continued to advance. The urban population last year reached 953.8 million, an increase of 10.3 million from the previous year, while the rural population fell by 13.69 million to 451.09 million. As a result, the urbanization rate, which represents the proportion of the population living in cities, rose by 0.89 percentage points year-on-year to 67.89%.
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