China’s demographic crisis threatens the Party’s grand plans

By Phil Lawler ( bio - articles - email ) | Feb 04, 2026

Americans are understandably worried about competition—economic, military, and ideological—from China. Can our society resist China’s drive for world dominance? The long-term outlook is worrisome.

But China has a long-term problem of its own. The country’s population is shrinking, and the rate of shrinkage is accelerating. Once not too long ago, any high-school student, asked to name the world’s most populous nation, would confidently name China. Then for a few years the answer was in doubt. Now there is no longer a doubt: the correct answer is India.

A decade or two ago, Chinese leaders would have welcomed that news. The Communist Party was determined to curb population growth, convinced that the pressing needs of young children would interfere with the Party’s all-important plans for economic growth. So the Party imposed a brutal “one child only” policy, using political pressure and fines and even forced abortion and sterilization to curb the size of families.

But like all central government planning, the one-child policy had a fatal flaw, quite apart from its vile moral implications. Yes, young children consume resources. But young children also have a tendency to become adults, who produce resources. Meanwhile adults who were in their most productive years when the one-child policy came into effect are now aging, becoming less economically productive, and looking for help from their children—who, in many cases, were never born.

Belatedly recognizing the demographic crisis that their policy had created, the Party leaders first relaxed the one-child policy, then offered various incentives for couples having children. But now the full force of their error has become apparent. Those new policies are not working; the birth rate has continued to decline. Before the one-child policy was rescinded in 2016, China’s fertility rate was 1.67; today it is just barely over 1.0. In 2016 there were 17.9 million babies born in China; last year there were only 7.9: a difference of roughly 10 million, and a drop of over 50% in a decade.

Why is the birth rate still falling, despite the increasingly strong pro-natal incentives offered by the government? To some extent the decline was predictable. The young women who were sterilized during the years of the one-child policy are still sterile. The girls who were not born during those years (when sex-selection abortion was common) are not now entering their child-bearing years. But above all, the propaganda that the Party hammered into the consciousness of the Chinese people has had a lasting effect. When people have been trained to think of babies as economic and social burdens, they will not quickly un-learn that lesson.

Let to themselves, families will grow. But after decades of government interference the natural process has stalled. Steven Mosher of the Population Research Institute notes an especially perverse result of the Chinese government’s meddling: the people who on paper should be most responsive to the government’s are in fact unusually resistant. Mosher reports:

In the days of the one-child policy, powerful officials frequently violated the limit with impunity, having second, third, and fourth children. Now they are again ignoring the Party line—in the other direction—rejecting the call to have a second child, much less a third.

So now the Chinese Communist Party is learning another painful lesson—and it is a lesson that Western governments should learn as well: Economic incentives alone do not produce population growth. Couples do not have children because they want tax breaks or maternity benefits or special bonus payments. Babies are produced not by government policies but by acts of love. Not love for the nation or the Communist Party or the Five-Year Plan or the prospect of world domination, but the love of men and women for each other.

There is another factor here, however. When couples who have been schooled since childhood to practice “family planning” make the decision to put away the contraceptives and have children, they are showing their confidence in the future of their society. Clearly young Chinese couples today do not have that confidence, regardless of the grand designs of the Party leadership. As Mosher concludes: “At the end of the day, Communism may prove to be the best contraceptive ever invented.”

The Beijing government launched an all-out assault on the family, in the quest for economic growth. Now the healthy structures of family life have been shattered, and the long-term economic outlook is bleak. Let the Chinese experience by a lesson to the West.