Even a baby boom can’t stop China’s population shrinking

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Dr Xiujian Peng, a senior research fellow specialising in China’s demography at Victoria University, said once the fertility rate dipped below 2.1 it was very difficult for countries to reverse the trend.

“Even if China could magically increase the fertility rate in a very short period of time to 2.1, in our calculation it would still take between 50 [and] 70 years to change this decline to the positive,” she said.

“That’s why we can say that for many years we will see the population decline in China.”

The Chinese government has rolled out a series of measures aimed at encouraging women to have babies since officially abandoning the one-child policy almost a decade ago. In 2021, it embraced a three-child policy and more recently it has rolled out cash incentives for women having a second or third child, as well as childcare subsidies.

Dr Fuxian Yi, a demographer and an obstetrician at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said the increase in births in 2024 was temporary and could be attributed to the long tail of the Chinese government’s Zero-COVID policy that led some people to delay marriage and childbearing.

“The end of the policy in December 2022 led to a 12 per cent increase in marriages in 2023, which means there was a temporary rebound in births in 2024 compared to 2023,” he said.

But 2024 also saw a sharp drop in marriages, suggesting that the number of births in 2025 would also plummet, he said.

Many of China’s neighbours are also facing a demographic crisis, with Japan, South Korea and Taiwan all experiencing shrinking populations. Women’s expectations around career goals, as well as the cost of raising children and poor support structures, are commonly attributed as key reasons for the declining fertility rate.

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