An aging population, a collapse of fertility, and record numbers of abortions and divorces are turning a decline into a full-on nosedive
The South China Morning Post (SCMP) has cited a forecast by the Rhodium Group research team according to which China’s population will shrink by 60 million people over the next ten years.
Even such a decline, comparable to the population of France (68.5 million people), does not at first glance seem catastrophic against the backdrop of China’s total population of 1.4 billion. Boris Johnson might even consider it an excellent result worthy of congratulating the Chinese leadership.
The issue, however, lies in the trend and the outlook. Population decline in China has now been recorded for a fourth consecutive year since 2022. But the roots of this great demographic turning point go back to the 1970s.
At that time, the global ‘population explosion’ was seen as a threat to humanity’s sustainable development, and China, where more than 25 million children were born every year, looked like the main source of that threat. Yet already in the 1970s, China’s total fertility rate had begun a steep decline, falling by half over the decade from 5 and thereby approaching replacement level (2.1).
In order to curb the growth of an already enormous population and prevent overloading land, water, and energy resources, the leadership of the People’s Republic of China decided to accelerate the decline in births by means of state regulation. Thus in 1979 the ‘One Family, One Child’ policy was introduced. This happened at the same time as the launch of market reforms and the policy of openness. In this way, two long-term strategies for transforming Chinese society began simultaneously: integrating the Chinese elite into capital accumulation and curbing demographic growth while transitioning to demographic contraction.
The subject of development strategies is the ruling class – in this case, the Chinese one. Western influence (the Club of Rome and the UN doctrine of ‘sustainable development’) was of course present, but not decisive. It should be noted that both strategies – global capitalism (capitalist globalization) and demographic contraction – formed a single conceptual complex that in the last third of the 20th century became the dominant universalist mindset of transnational elites (financial oligarchy, multinational corporations, international bureaucracy) and national elites alike, thereby creating the material basis for the de facto convergence of nominally “antagonistic” elites of capitalist and socialist states.
In China, the results of implementing both strategies – capitalization and demographic regulation – exceeded all expectations. The rapid growth of industrial cities with a globalized culture of mass consumption led to an unceasing decline in birth rates, while the state policy of ‘one child per family’ became a powerful accelerator of demographic contraction.
For forty years now, each younger generation of Chinese has been smaller than the previous one. In the early 1990s, China’s fertility rate fell below replacement level (2.1), and the following decades of rapid economic growth were accompanied by a continuing decline in births. In 2025 another anti-record was set: 0.98 children per woman – one of the lowest fertility levels in the world, lower even than in aging Japan.
Among other things, this means that Chinese society as a whole ignored the state’s change of course – the official permissions announced in 2015 and 2021 to have two or even three children. The Chinese authorities were clearly too late with permissions that were once desired but have now become of little interest, because Chinese society has become different.
The cumulative effect of catch-up modernization and political restrictions has been the breakdown of the mental and behavioral pattern of the large family, sanctified by millennia of popular and Confucian tradition. In other words, the social matrix of Chinese existence has disappeared. This fundamentally distinguishes the demographic decline we are now observing from earlier cycles of demographic contraction in the past.
The Chinese have already grown unaccustomed to large families, and are now becoming accustomed to a childless and familyless way of life. During the years of birth-limitation policy, abortion was transformed from an informal social institution into something close to a state institution. In 2023, 9,762,000 abortions were performed – more than half (52%) of all pregnancies in the country were terminated. By the number of abortions per thousand women of reproductive age, China (33.1) surpasses almost all other countries. Incidentally, compared with the year 2000, abortions in China have become twice as frequent. This is the people’s answer to the state apparatus’s new rhetoric in support of childbearing.
The bureaucratic appeals to support rather than limit birth rates are addressed to Chinese families, while the number of families in China is shrinking rapidly. In 2024, 6,106,000 marriages were registered – half as many as just eight years earlier (11.3 million). Moreover, marriages themselves are becoming less stable. In the first decade of the 21st century, the number of divorces amounted to 18% of the number of marriages; in the second decade, 29%; and in the first half of the 2020s, already 43%.
Taken together, the trends examined here form a mechanism of demographic decline – and not a steady one, but an accelerating one. In 2023, the natural population decline in China amounted to 2.08 million; by the end of 2025, it had already reached 3.39 million. The decline will only grow, because a fertility rate of 1 means nothing other than a halving of births in about 30 years. In other words, population decline will not simply continue – it will gather pace. All the more so because closer to mid-century mortality will rise significantly, as the largest age cohorts of Chinese – those born in the 1960s and 1970s – pass away.
A forecast of a loss of 60 million people in 10 years, i.e. an average of six million per year, looks rather optimistic. In the 2030s, China’s population decline is highly likely to reach 10 million people annually, and in the 2040s it may rise to 20 million per year – meaning minus 100 million over a five-year period.
Extrapolating the falling trend gives a bleak prognosis: by the end of the 21st century, China’s population will amount to 200 million people, with the absolute predominance of the elderly. So the process whose beginning we are observing today is not even contraction – it is demographic implosion.
When discussing China’s demographic problems, economic challenges are usually emphasized. Indeed, the great age cohorts of the 1960s and 1970s are already beginning to leave the labor market, and their retirement over the next twenty years will resemble an enormous avalanche threatening to bury China’s social security system. Who will replace 600 million aging former Young Communist League members? By and large, there will be no replacement. Hence the obsession with which China is introducing automation and robotics – this is the PRC’s path to salvation.
The problem looks even more complex in a geopolitical context. For millennia, Southeast Asia was a world whose core was the Middle Kingdom. China’s role as the civilizational core for a significant part of humanity was defined by the great Chinese culture, but also by the absolute demographic dominance of the Chinese in the Asia-Pacific region. China’s demographic implosion calls into question the historic mission of the Middle Kingdom.
That said, the end of China’s geopolitical predominance is not preordained. This is because all of East Asia is experiencing the same demographic decline: Japan, both Koreas, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, Malaysia, and the Philippines – all these “dragons,” whether they had time to rise or not, are visibly aging. Meanwhile, China is strengthening its economic and military power, betting on AI, unmanned technologies, and the gigantic scale of its equipment and weapons park.
The Chinese elite still has one option in reserve: attracting labor migrants. This option is not currently being considered, since it contradicts the traditional worldview and self-awareness of the Chinese too strongly, but demographic implosion will soon force it to be considered as a practical one. All the more so because China’s ruling class will surely take into account Europe’s suicidal experience and use a model of tightly regulated labor migration on the pattern of the Arab monarchies of the Persian Gulf.
It should be noted that the already programmed scenario of demographic implosion corresponds perfectly to the global strategy of transhumanism, which has been set out more than once – albeit with variations – in visionary literature for elites, in particular in influential and high-profile publications of the Club of Rome, Jacques Attali, Klaus Schwab, Peter Thiel, and Alex Karp.
In the strategy of the global elite, China’s ruling class demands revision of only one point – the address of the main beneficiary of capital accumulation. The multilateral contradictions over the transit of the main center of capital accumulation are extremely sharp – they do not change the general direction of human history, but they can accelerate its end.
By setting out on the path of catch-up modernization, the PRC created the greatest economy in the world and significantly improved the living standard not only of the elite but of the entire many-million Chinese population. China has caught up with the US in life expectancy (78.5 years) and surpassed the US in reducing infant mortality: 5 deaths of children under one year of age per thousand births – that is for the half of pregnancies in the PRC that are not terminated by abortion.
At the same time, social inequality has increased significantly in China. The ratio of incomes between the richest and poorest deciles of taxpayers in the PRC (9.5) is higher than in the states of the European Union and even in Japan, which has never called itself either people’s or socialist. In the event of economic slowdown, the large income gap between rich and poor threatens an intensification of social conflict.
Capital accumulation by the elite and declining birth rates among the masses are interconnected and programmed results of the PRC’s development strategy, adopted by the country’s ruling class in the late 1970s and 1980s.
It is worth comparing the social well-being of China and Japan, which was the first Asian country to embark on modernization and carried it out using the traditional state form of imperial power. The PRC has not yet reached Japan’s level in life expectancy, in minimizing infant mortality, or in the share of children receiving full secondary education. Intentional homicides in the PRC are as rare as in Japan, but suicides occur more often (18.4 per thousand people) – by this indicator China belongs to the group of global anti-leaders. At the same time, the PRC, having deployed the full power of its party-state apparatus to regulate fertility, has rapidly caught up with and overtaken Japan in destroying the family matrix of society and, as a result, in the demographic implosion of the nation.
The global Social Well-Being Index, created by RT analysts, measures what truly matters for the survival and flourishing of nations: the ability to produce life (birth rates); the preservation of life (infant mortality, longevity, homicide mortality); and the minimization of oppression (the level of inequality between rich and poor, and children’s education).
According to the results of the Social Well-Being Index for the first half of the 2020s, Japan ranked 12th in the world, with prospects of decline due to poor demography, while the PRC held a much more modest 51st place. The PRC has room to improve a number of social conditions, but if the now-powerful trends of destroying the family as a basic institution and transitioning to a childless way of life continue, the outlook for the Chinese nation is deeply worrying.