China’s Births Collapse to Record Low as Marriages Vanish

Only 7.92 million babies were born in China in 2025 — the lowest number since the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949, and a 17 percent collapse from the 9.54 million recorded just the year before. According to figures released by China’s National Bureau of Statistics, the national birth rate fell to 5.63 births per 1,000 people, the lowest ever logged. Deaths, meanwhile, climbed to 11.31 million, meaning China’s population contracted for a fourth consecutive year, shrinking by 3.39 million to 1.40489 billion people at the close of 2025 — the steepest single-year drop since the crisis years of the Great Leap Forward. This is no longer a forecast. It is the present tense of the world’s second-largest economy.

The velocity of the decline is what alarms demographers most. Population loss began in 2022 with a drop of 850,000, then widened to 2.08 million in 2023 and 1.39 million in 2024, before nearly doubling again last year. Analysts at the Rhodium Group project that China will shed close to 60 million people over the coming decade — roughly the population of France — with annual losses reaching 7.6 million by 2035. Worse for policymakers, the sharpest population losses are now concentrated in China’s wealthiest coastal provinces, the very engines of consumption and productivity Beijing is counting on to rebalance the economy. The RAND Corporation estimates China’s population could fall by as much as 250 million people from its current 1.4 billion by 2050.

Underneath the birth numbers sits a quieter, arguably more consequential trend: Chinese people are simply not marrying. Marriage registrations, which culturally and administratively precede childbearing in China, plunged to 6.1 million in 2024 — a 20.5 percent single-year collapse and the lowest figure since 1980, according to China’s Ministry of Civil Affairs. A modest rebound to 6.76 million followed in 2025, but the reprieve proved short-lived: Reuters reported in May 2026 that first-quarter marriages fell a further 6.2 percent year-on-year, landing at roughly half of 2017 levels. Divorce filings, by contrast, keep climbing — nearly 2.6 million couples separated in 2024 alone. The average age at first marriage has risen accordingly, from 32.4 in 2018 to 34 in 2024, per Rhodium Group’s analysis of official data.

The generational shift is stark in the data on when — and whether — people wed at all. In 2005, nearly half of newlyweds in China were 24 or younger; by 2024 that share had collapsed to just 13 percent, while more than half of new couples were over 30, according to figures compiled by China’s National Bureau of Statistics. A 2021 survey by the Communist Youth League found that 44 percent of unmarried urban women had no intention of ever marrying. Beijing has tried cash — some municipalities offering up to 40,000 yuan (about $5,487) to newlyweds — alongside simplified registration rules that let couples marry anywhere in the country rather than only in their home district. Neither has meaningfully reversed the trend.

The economics behind the retreat from marriage and parenthood are unambiguous. A widely cited 2024 baseline study by the Beijing-based YuWa Population Research Institute put the cost of raising a child to age 18 in China at 538,000 yuan (roughly $75,000) nationally — more than six times the country’s per-capita GDP — rising to 667,000 yuan in cities, a burden researchers ranked second only to South Korea’s globally. Youth joblessness has eased somewhat since: China’s urban unemployment rate for 16-to-24-year-olds, excluding students, fell to 14.9 percent in June 2026, its third straight monthly decline, according to China’s National Bureau of Statistics — though economists caution the rate typically climbs again as fresh graduates enter the market later in the year. Against that backdrop, a cultural movement known as tangping, or “lying flat” — a deliberate withdrawal from careers, property ownership, marriage, and childbearing — has moved from internet slang to a recognised social phenomenon that Communist Party commentators have publicly denounced as corrosive to the nation’s development goals, per reporting from the Voice of America.

What happens, structurally, when millions of young people opt out of family formation at once? The first casualty is the workforce. China’s working-age share of the population (ages 15–59) has fallen to 61.89 percent, down from 67.33 percent a decade ago, while the average household size has shrunk to 2.52 people from 3.10, according to demographic data cited by regional reporting on the National Bureau of Statistics figures. Beijing’s response has been to raise the retirement age for the first time since the 1950s — gradually lifting it to 63 for men and 58 for women by 2040 — even as roughly 300 million people aged 50 to 60 are expected to exit the labour force over the next decade, a cohort roughly the size of the entire population of the United States.

The second casualty is the family itself as a welfare institution. Decades under the one-child policy produced what demographers call the “4-2-1” structure — a single adult child left responsible for two ageing parents and, in many cases, four grandparents, with no siblings to share the burden. A 2025 qualitative study published in Frontiers in Public Health, drawn from hundreds of first-person accounts by only children caring for aging parents, captured the strain in blunt terms: one respondent wrote online that they didn’t dare fall ill, marry far from home, or die, because they were the only child their parents had. China’s population aged 60 and above reached 323 million people — 23 percent of the population — in 2025. Pension economists warn the fiscal consequences will compound: modelling by the Centre for Economic Policy Research projects that pension spending could climb from 5.4 percent of GDP to 15.3 percent by 2050, even as ageing alone shaves roughly two percentage points off annual GDP growth.

None of this is unique to China in kind — Japan and South Korea have walked similar paths — but it is unprecedented in scale and speed. A nation that built its rise on the world’s largest labour force is now confronting the mathematics of its own family-planning history: three decades of state-enforced restraint under the one-child policy shrank the pool of people now old enough to marry, even before economic anxiety and shifting gender expectations entered the picture. The generation raised to believe fewer children meant a better life is now the generation being asked, unsuccessfully, to have more of them.

For Beijing, the demographic ledger is now inseparable from questions of pension solvency, military recruitment, consumer demand, and long-term geopolitical weight. For the individuals at the centre of the statistics, the calculus is more immediate — rent, childcare costs, job security, and a quiet, widening consensus among China’s young that opting out is the more rational choice. Whether that calculus shifts before the labour force does may determine how the world’s second-largest economy ages: gradually, or all at once.