China population down by 3 million from previous year, birth rate lowest since 1949. Is Beijing's one-child policy backfiring big time?

China’s population stands at 1.404 billion today, down three million from the previous year. And the central government's challenge remains much as it has always been: to manage a citizenry that both enhances the country’s strength and claims enormous resources. Birth rate numbers released on Monday, the lowest since Mao's Communists established the People's Republic in 1949, are the latest development in a millennia-long struggle in China, where producing children and refreshing the population of the young have been central to the national conversation since the country's earliest days, as per an AP report.

But various factors — policy, generational change and general evolution of the way people live — have officials concerned that there won't be enough young Chinese people to build the tomorrow they want. This week’s numbers illustrate how complicated the problem remains.

It doesn’t help that India surpassed China in population in 2023. The on-again, off-again rival and neighbor of China has vied of late to be the leader of the Global South, a mantle China is pursuing as well as an alternative to what it considers Western 'hegemony'. That’s a factor that makes China’s population both an internal and an international issue.


China's One-Child Policy

It's likely that urban Chinese of the 1980s could barely imagine the situation today — a society where the government is pushing families to have more — up to three — children.

The one-child policy, officially instituted in 1980 four years after Mao's death, was designed to curb a growing population. It restricted Chinese couples to a single offspring and eventually, in many cases, punished them if they didn't comply. The rationale: At that time, under Deng Xiaoping's policy of “reform and opening-up,” the country's capital and resources couldn't keep up with the population's demands.

Beijing's answer was to slow the population's growth. Over time, that created a disproportionate amount of elderly people. “China’s demographic transition, characterized by people getting old before becoming rich, creates challenges and opportunities,” the state-controlled newspaper China Daily said in 2024.

In the years after implementation, the one-child policy produced unintended consequences:

A desire for sons gave rise to the hiding, mistreatment and sometimes outright killing of baby girls, especially in rural areas.

Among better-off families in cities — where the policy was primarily aimed — it also gave rise to millions of households in which an only child became the focus of attention, creating a generation of what some call “little emperors.”

Coupled with recent loosening of the “hukou,” or household registration, system that limits where Chinese people can live within their country, many only children wound up living far from their parents, promoting social ills like loneliness and alienation.

Population growth slowed to a crawl, leading in recent years to numbers like Monday's.

Xi Jinping's Big Moves

As the one-child policy ebbed, Chinese President Xi Jinping rejuvenated that age-old notion. He started to publicly liken the population to Chinese power once again — or, as he put it, a “great wall of steel forged by over 1.4 billion Chinese people.”

So the country has taken some measures to, for lack of a better term, reduce the friction. Condoms are taxed. Day care centers are not. Even matchmakers, a cornerstone of traditional Chinese culture, also now find themselves doing their work tax-free.

More systemically, plans for the nation's next five-year plan for development, beginning this year, include an aim to “encourage positive views on marriage and childbearing” in addition to doubling down on incentives for increasing birth rates and reducing the costs of having and raising children. The official Xinhua News Agency last month said that the initiatives, taken together, represent “a plan to make childbirth essentially free.”