| That’s all they’re admitting to. How much is it really, and how far back did it start? |
[Breitbart] China’s National Bureau of Statistics published the 2026 edition of its yearbook this week, revealing that the national population declined by 3.39 million in 2025 — the fourth decline in a row, and the worst since 2022.
China’s population remains enormous at over 1.4 billion, but the cycle of births and deaths left it 7.71 million people smaller than it was in 2021, the beginning of China’s seemingly inexorable population decline.
Foreign Affairs called it “China’s long twilight,” pointing out that the situation for China was graver than the total population numbers indicated, because a generation of much-needed young workers is not being born:
By the 2040s, if China continues to follow East Asia’s descent to ultralow fertility rates, it will shed around one percent of its population annually—roughly ten million people, more than the population of New York City. At the same time, the proportion of China’s population aged 65 and older will surge, doubling from 15 percent today to around 30 percent in the 2040s, and then rising to well over 40 percent by the late twenty-first century. The size of that cohort in the United States, by contrast, is projected to rise far more gradually, from around 19 percent of the population today to just over 23 percent in 2060.
Put simply, China is entering a century of demographic decline. This change will remake the country’s economy and politics just as dramatically as the last century’s demographic boom did.
Signs of this century of decline include China’s “increasingly regressive and rigid” political system, which relies on “repression and reflexively following central mandates” instead of innovation.
Foreign Affairs pointed out that China’s economy under dictator Xi Jinping relies heavily upon pumping out waves of cheap exports as domestic consumer demand withers, while its government is increasingly a one-man show marked by sudden purges of top officials, without the flexibility that characterized the boom years — and growing population — of Xi’s predecessor Deng Xiaoping.
“Even as the country heads toward a demographic cliff, Beijing seems incapable of preparing for the social challenges it will face in the decades ahead,” the article concluded.
The American Enterprise Institute (AEI) argued that China’s sudden “birth crash” would undermine every plan the Politburo made over the previous two decades, because those plans were premised on a growing industrial base of young workers.
AEI placed much of the blame on China’s infamous “One Child” policy of forced abortions, which crippled Chinese fertility rates in the 90s and set the stage for a “full-blown plunge” in the 2010s. The post-One Child “birth shock” produced the kind of population decline that usually follows a devastating war or plague.
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