China’s birth rate hit another record low last year and for the fourth year in a row, deaths exceeded births. China has fallen to the world’s second most populous country after India. Births fell a huge 17pc in 2025 compared with 2024. The birth rate is now at about 1 per woman, about half population replacement level.

The Standard newspaper in Hong Kong reports: “The country’s population dropped by 3.39 million to 1.405 billion, a faster decline than 2024, while the total number of births dropped to 7.92 million in 2025, down 17pc from 9.54 million in 2024. The number of deaths rose to 11.31 million from 10.93 million in 2024, figures from China’s National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) showed.”

Commenting on the situation demographer Yi Fuxian of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said on X that births are now at “roughly the same level as in 1738, when China’s population was only about 150 million”.

However, the number of marriages has gone up. The Standard reports: “Marriages rose 22.5 percent from a year earlier to 1.61 million in the third quarter of 2025, putting China on course to halt an almost decade-long annual decline in marriages. Full data for 2025 will be released later this year.” This might lead to an increase in births because marriage and birth rates tend to go up and down together.

Across East Asia, births are well below replacement level and populations are ageing rapidly.