China’s fertility rate has fallen below one birth per woman, signaling a demographic crisis ahead.
« Imploded » might be too strong a word, but Communist China just entered the growing ranks of nations with a fertility rate below a single birth per woman — less than half the replacement level.
The implosion might not be here quite yet, but it is coming.
« Last week, Beijing’s release of China’s national birth count for 2025 left demographers stunned », Nicholas Eberstadt wrote for the New York Post on Saturday. « The national birth total plummeted by over 17% from 2024 to 2025 », a drop that is « almost never seen in stable modern societies. »
Stick a pin in that last part. I’ll come back to it shortly.
Eberstadt called the figures « 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. »
« The new birth figures imply that the total fertility rate [TFR] has finally fallen below one birth per woman », 10 ironic years after Xi ended China’s notorious One Child Policy.
It’s a short list of countries with a TFR of less than one: South Korea, Taiwan, Ukraine, Singapore, Thailand, and now China.
Demographics move slowly, but absent a swift turnaround, the movement is inexorably toward decline.
Women must bear an average of 2.1 children for a population to remain steady. Anything above that, and a population grows. Anything less, and it slowly shrinks. At a TFR of 1.3, some experts hypothesize a nation enters the Low Fertility Trap, where each generation is roughly 50% smaller than the preceding generation — and that there’s little hope of escape.
