China's Demographic Crisis and the Return to 400 Million – by PKU Prof. Zhang Junni

Recently released official data show that China’s population decline accelerated in 2025, with the lowest birth rate since national records began in 1949.

China is not the only country facing a demographic cliff-edge, but as with many aspects of China’s political economy, the scale and speed of the shift are remarkable. This edition’s author, Zhang Junni (张俊妮), notes that China’s total fertility rate fell from 1.3 to 1.01 in just three years, whereas South Korea took 17 years to drop from 1.3 to around 1.0.

China’s controversial legacy of family planning made this a politically fraught conversation for many years, but in 2021 Beijing formalised the turn from birth restriction to encouragement through the three-child policy.

A sign of how far the conversation has moved into the open is Xi Jinping’s Qiushi article on the topic, published in November 2024. Still, the official framing remains notably non-alarmist, treating population decline as a new normal to be managed—with downsides, but also potential upsides. Cai Fang (蔡昉), in a March 2023 speech summarised by Sinification, typifies this mainstream, technocratic approach.

Zhang is notably more concerned, treating demography as a strategic constraint on China’s innovation capacity, economic output, and even its international “discursive power” (话语权), and arguing that the window for gradualism is closing.

Other prominent voices in China’s pronatalist debate, such as Huang Wenzheng (黄文政) and Liang Jianzhang (梁建章), also sit on the more alarmist side. In a separate article, they argue that the long-run national impact of ultra-low fertility “far exceeds that of war and economic crisis”. They also advocate a radical package of fiscal incentives, arguing that spending might need to rise as high as 10%—or even 20%—of GDP.

Zhang’s speech, however, is especially interesting because it largely sidelines the popular idea of fiscal incentives. It belongs to the more “socio-cultural levers” camp in the demography debate, focusing on disincentives rooted in China’s high-pressure education system. In doing so, she borrows the term “involution” (内卷), which readers will recognise from debates on overcapacity, to describe wasteful, zero-sum competition in China’s education and employment system.

Zhang’s speech also stands out for its rare call for China to consider immigration—a topic she herself notes is acutely sensitive.

— Jacob Mardell

1. China’s demographic decline is accelerating. After three consecutive years of population contraction, the total fertility rate has fallen from 1.3 to 1.01 in just three years—a decline that took South

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