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.
