China’s population shrinks again

Declaring childbirth a patriotic act. Nagging newlyweds about family planning. Taxing condoms.

To get its citizens to have babies, the Chinese Communist Party has pulled every lever.

The efforts have largely failed. For the fourth year in a row, China reported more deaths than births in 2025 as its birth rate plunged, leaving its population smaller and older.

The government Monday said that 7.92 million babies were born last year, down from the 9.54 million babies born in 2024. The number of people who died in 2025, 11.31 million, continued to climb. The latest population figures were reported alongside economic data that showed China’s economy grew 5% in 2025.

Around the world, governments are contending with falling birth rates. But the problem is more acute for China: Fewer babies mean fewer future workers to support a rapidly growing cohort of retirees. A worsening economy has made addressing the challenge even more difficult.

China’s top leaders have redoubled their efforts to try to boost the national birth rate enough to reverse the decline, something that demographers have said is probably impossible now that China has crossed a demographic threshold where its fertility rate, a measure of the number of children a woman has over a lifetime, is so low that its population is shrinking.

Xi Jinping, China’s top leader, has called for a “new type of marriage and childbearing culture,” entreating officials to influence young people’s views on “love and marriage, fertility and family.” Local officials have responded with increasingly ham-handed measures to get citizens to have babies, including tracking women’s menstrual cycles and issuing guidelines to reduce medically unnecessary abortions.

Many of the measures have been met with a collective shrug by young people who do not want to start a family.

On Jan. 1, officials placed a 13% value-added tax on contraceptive drugs and condoms, a move that has been met with a mix of indifference, mockery and derision.

While that policy was not explicitly directed at boosting the birth rate, it was immediately interpreted by a skeptical public as yet another futile attempt to encourage more children.

Jonathan Zhu, 28, said the price increase would have little effect on his habits. “I’ll still use them,” he said, citing financial pressure as his reason for delaying fatherhood until marriage. His girlfriend, Hu Tingyan, 26, agreed, noting that the cost of condoms does not influence her willingness to have children. “I don’t feel the time is right yet,” she said.

On Chinese social media, people commented that the price increase was annoying, but it was still cheaper than raising a child. Others pointed out that condoms had more than one purpose.

“Which ‘genius’ came up with this brilliant move?” asked Ke Chaozhen, a lawyer based in Guangdong. “The state is urging marriage and births in such a subtle way — are they afraid that we marriage and family lawyers will go out of business?” he mused on social media.

Other comments were deemed so incendiary by state-directed censors that they were scrubbed from Chinese social media platforms.

Some of the government’s other baby-boosting measures, such as offering cash and subsidized housing for couples, have also failed to move the needle.

“The empirical evidence from other countries so far is that monetary incentives have almost no effect in raising fertility,” said Wang Feng, a professor of sociology at the University of California, Irvine.

For many young people, the high costs of raising a child are especially discouraging amid a slowing economy and a property crisis. In addition, youth unemployment remains high, and many recent college graduates are struggling to land a steady paycheck, falling back on their parents with little support from a threadbare social welfare system.

“With China’s economic woes, young people may want to wait and see, and that’s not good news for raising fertility,” Wang said.

China arrived at this problem much sooner than it anticipated it would even a decade ago, when officials relaxed the one-child policy to permit couples to have two children. (It adjusted its birth policy again to allow three babies in 2021.) This has left the government with less time to fix its severely underfunded pension and health care systems.

At the same time, China has experienced a sudden and rapid decline in the working-age population, as the number of citizens age 60 and over is projected to reach 400 million by 2035. Young people often express reluctance to contribute to the public pension fund because of the financial burden.

A low retirement age has complicated things. The government raised it last year for the first time since the 1950s and plans to gradually increase the official age by 2040 to 63 for men, 58 for women in office jobs and 55 for women in factories. However, it remains among the lowest in the world.

More recently, some party officials have even offered cash rewards to successful matchmakers, hoping to spur a baby boom by getting more people to marry.

Jia Dan, 46, understands the scope of the challenge. When he was single, Dan began hosting matchmaking events in Beijing in 2012 as a side project. Soon, he found a girlfriend. (They later married.) His events became so popular that he decided to turn them into a full-time business in 2018.

Since then, two things have become clear to him. It’s always the men who return. Women rarely attend more than once.

More glaringly, most people don’t seem to want to get married.

“You can really feel that the number of people in Beijing who actually want to get married is shrinking,” he said. “More and more young people just don’t want to do it anymore.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.