BEIJING, July 20 — China’s population, which for decades swelled under the banner of the world’s most populous nation, is now shrinking. Official data for 2025 placed the mainland population at 1.404 billion — a drop of three million from the prior year — while the birthrate sank to its lowest level since the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949. The total fertility rate has fallen below 1.0, placing China alongside South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore in a club of exceptionally low fertility.
Since 2022, deaths have outnumbered births every year. The population growth rate now sits at −0.10%.
For all the noise about economic targets and technological ambitions, the salient point is demographic: a shrinking base of young people is now baked into the system.
The legacy of the one-child policy
These trends do not come from nowhere. The one-child policy, enforced in urban areas from 1979 to 2015 (with a two-child allowance in some rural areas), was designed to slow runaway population growth. It succeeded rather too well.
Under Mao Zedong, the population nearly doubled, from 540 million in 1949 to 969 million in 1979. China hit one billion in 1982, the year of a particularly well-regarded census — one that benefited from $100 million in United Nations assistance.
But the decades of restriction left a small youth cohort, and as those children aged, the demographic consequences became inescapable. The 2020 census gave a total population of 1,419,933,142, comprising 1,411,778,724 on the mainland, 7,474,200 in Hong Kong, and 683,218 in Macau. Han Chinese made up 91.11% of that figure, with 8.89% from minority groups.
Not everyone trusts those numbers. Yi Fuxian, an obstetrics researcher, has alleged that local governments inflate population data to secure larger financial subsidies.
The central government has not acknowledged systematic inflation, but the dispute underscores the difficulty of measuring a nation of 1.4 billion people.
An unevenly peopled land
Whatever the true count, the distribution of China’s population is starkly uneven. Roughly 94% of people live east of the Heihe–Tengchong Line, an imaginary diagonal that slices from the northeast to the southwest. That line encloses only 43% of the country’s land area.
In the eastern zone, population density approaches Japan’s level — about 280 people per square kilometre. The most crowded regions include the Yangtze River Valley, the Sichuan Basin, the North China Plain, the Pearl River Delta, and the area around Shenyang.
By contrast, the vast northwest and southwest remain sparsely settled. China has conducted national censuses in 1953, 1964, 1982, 1990, 2000, 2010 and 2020. The 1982 enumeration is still considered the most reliable, in part thanks to that UN assistance.
It captured a country at the peak of its policy-driven demographic experiment. Looking ahead, the numbers point to continued contraction.
With a fertility rate below replacement and a shrinking base of young adults, the population seems set to age further. What the government does about it — whether to loosen migration rules, encourage larger families, or accept a smaller, older society — remains an open question. For now, the decline is steady, and the data is clear.
