We have already reached peak-China, despite the CCP’s best efforts to turn demographics around.
In 1979, the Chinese Communist Party enacted the infamous one-child policy, limiting urban families to having one child each to constrain rapid population growth. Ten years after the policy was repealed, it can now declare victory. If only restricting births were still the goal.
China released data on Monday showing that its birthrate has fallen to a record low of 5.63 per 1,000 people in 2025, down from 6.4 births two years earlier. The total number of babies born last year, 7.92 million, was eclipsed by 11.31 million deaths. Trends have births continuing to plummet into the future and deaths continuing to rise as China’s population ages into the grave.
The fertility necessary for a developed society to be “replacement-level,” or capable of sustaining the existing population level organically, is 2.1 births per woman. The United States currently sits at 1.6 — not ideal. The European Union is at 1.4 births per woman. China’s fertility rate, meanwhile, is now below 1.
If you don’t want your population to shrink and your age distribution to look like an upside-down bowling pin, countries with below-replacement-level fertility can turn to immigration. Import the human capital you don’t make domestically anymore. That is how America’s population is projected to grow over the next three decades, albeit at a very slowed pace. Yet China permits (and attracts) so few immigrants that it loses population through net migration as well.
Realizing the error of its ways, the Chinese regime has veered from its horrific one-child policy to relentless encouragement of childbearing through messaging and incentives. The Chinese people have responded by having many fewer babies than they did when the government punished them for having more than one. Central planners everywhere, take note.
All this to say: China’s population is not going up any time soon. In fact, it has already reached its apex and will only fall from here with increasing velocity. It will be composed of many more old people, exiting the workforce and requiring care, and many fewer of the young people needed to support them. If demographics are destiny, China is doomed — at least in the long run.
The one-child policy will go down as one of the greatest self-inflicted catastrophes in human history. Not just by helping collapse China’s birthrates, but by creating a permanent imbalance between the country’s younger male and female populations. (We can attribute this to abortion and even more appalling tactics by families who learned they were having a girl but wanted a boy.) America’s impending debt crisis will be a disaster of epic proportions, but even that will look like peanuts compared to what the Chinese government has done to its own population.
In the meantime, America should worry about a CCP that knows China’s window for superpower status is limited. Powerful nations in long-term decline may be more likely to pursue regional hegemony while the getting is still good. So we must stay alert on Taiwan, and fortify American and allied defenses in the Indo-Pacific to keep the Chinese military bottled up.
Keep things stable long enough for China to turn into a giant nursing home, however, and the threat it poses won’t seem so daunting.