China's demographic collapse and the failures of social engineering

The data released recently by China's National Bureau of Statistics reveal the most serious problem for the Communist Party: the birth rate fell to 5.63 births per 1,000 people in 2025, the lowest level since 1949. With just 7.92 million births compared to 11.31 million deaths, China is experiencing its fourth consecutive year of population decline. This collapse is not only a social and economic crisis but also the epitaph of an ideological concept held by governments worldwide: the belief that the state can construct and mold society's most intimate behaviors at will.

China's demographic crisis is the most eloquent failure of neoconstructivism in modern times. For decades, Beijing believed it could engineer the perfect society through decrees, fines and coercion. First, with the one-child policy (1980-2016), which included forced abortions and even abductions of "illegal children." Now, facing accelerated aging, it is trying to reverse the damage with the same planning arrogance: subsidies, free daycare, taxes on contraceptive methods and even the incredible method of knocking on doors asking newlyweds when they plan to get pregnant. Nothing has worked.

China eliminated the catastrophic one-child policy in 2016, allowing two children, then three in 2021, and ultimately implemented a battery of pronatalist incentives, from cash bonuses per child to tax breaks for daycare and matchmaking services. The regime declared raising the birthrate a national security priority. However, births in 2025 fell 17% from 2024, from 9.54 million to 7.92 million. In just nine years since the 2016 peak of 17.86 million births, China lost more than half its birthrate, a drop more dramatic than during Mao's Great Famine.

"Individual autonomy matters, even in authoritarian regimes. Despite the immense power of the Chinese regime, it cannot manufacture people's lives."

The fertility rate, the average number of children per woman, is around 1.0, well below the replacement level of 2.1 and among the lowest on the planet, comparable only to South Korea (0.75) and Taiwan (0.86). The United Nations projects that China's population, currently 1.404 billion, could fall to 800 million by 2100. The failure of Chinese pronatalist policies illustrates a fundamental truth that politicians across the ideological spectrum are reluctant to accept: society is not malleable clay in the hands of the state. Reproductive behaviors respond to cultural structures that exceed the short time frames of a political career, and are not reconfigured with decrees or monetary incentives.

The damage of the one-child policy is key to understanding the ravages of social engineering and what it costs to reverse them. This display of authoritarian intervention not only reduced fertility; it transformed mentalities. An entire generation grew up in small families with norms and values focused on early career success as a means of survival. Generations raised under the motto that fewer children meant progress. Decades of state violence in population control left scars. The brutal implementation of the one-child policy generated a deep distrust of new pronatalist state initiatives. Current incentives do not magically erase that collective trauma, no matter how much Xi Jinping might wish.

Today, the demographic deterioration is tangible, daily, irreversible. In the last two years, 36,000 preschools closed their doors in China due to lack of children. Preschool enrollment fell from 48 million in 2020 to less than 36 million today. It closes baby food factories, obstetric units and hundreds of thousands of teachers lose their jobs. In the next few years, the entire education system will face student shortages. The labor market will massively lose workers and this will be lethal for pension systems. Adults over 60 years of age represent a quarter of the population. The Chinese economy faces a future of weak domestic consumption and due to dependence on exports, the model is unsustainable.

Lessons for the world

The Chinese failure offers valuable lessons. The first is that demographic policies work to destroy but not to build. Fear can shrink families, but money cannot make them grow. The second is that cultural transformations have inertia of their own. Decades of state messages promoting small families created values, aspirations and social structures that are not reversed by advertising campaigns or subsidies. The most important lesson is that individual autonomy matters, even in authoritarian regimes. Despite the immense power of the Chinese regime, it cannot manufacture people's lives.

China's fertility decline is a snowball that rolled downhill. The most optimistic projections dream of the fertility rate stabilizing at 0.8 children per woman, a catastrophe that could be worse. Marriages fell 20% in 2024 to 6.1 million, the largest decline on record. In 2013, when Xi Jinping took power, China recorded 23.9 million marriages. Ten years later: 5.97 million.

Beijing may abandon the fantasy of reversing this trend and try to adapt to it with accelerated robotization, reforms to the retirement and pension system, and economic adjustments for an aging society. All alternatives will be unpopular and will tend to make spending more efficient, but they will not save the country from demographic winter. The key is that governments cannot solve birth rates. They can remove specific obstacles, but they cannot create the desire to have children. Some individual forces are beyond government control; fertility is one of them. China's history is a warning: when the state tries to build the perfect society, it often ends up destroying it.