BEIJING — China’s birthrate fell to a record low last year, deepening a demographic crisis that could drag on the world’s second-largest economy for decades.

The Chinese population shrank for the fourth year in a row in 2025, even as Beijing struggles to reverse the alarming trend.

Births dropped to 5.6 per 1,000 people in 2025, down from 6.4 in 2023, marking the lowest level on record, according to data compiled by Wind Information going back to the 1950s.

The rate fell to 5.63 births per 1,000 people in 2025, beneath 2023’s low of 6.39 per 1,000, China’s National Bureau of Statistics reported on Monday. The drop suggests that a slight uptick in births in 2024 was an outlier rather than a reversal of an otherwise steady decline since 2016.

Economists warned that a shrinking workforce and an ageing population pose major economic risks. Fewer babies mean a shrinking workforce in the future to support a rapidly growing cohort of retirees.

China’s economy grew 5% in 2025, officials also reported, in line with the government’s annual goal of “around 5%.”

The annual expansion was buoyed by a surge in Chinese exports that offset trade tensions with the US and weak consumption at home. China racked up a record $1.2 trillion-dollar trade surplus last year, despite US President Donald Trump’s on-again, off-again trade war with the world’s second largest economy.

Despite the on-target annual economic growth, the birth figures deal a blow to Beijing’s efforts to reverse the impact of decades of stringent, state-enforced birth control under the now-abandoned “one-child” policy, and persuade more young people to have children.

With the 7.92 million babies born in China last year outpaced by 11.31 million deaths, the overall population dropped by 3.39 million, the data shows. The country’s headcount – still the world’s second-largest, behind India’s – stands at 1.4 billion for 2025.

Years of stringent population control under the “one-child” policy, which was scrapped in 2016, have accelerated trends seen in other countries like Japan and South Korea, where falling birth rates have been seen as a result of rising education levels, changing views on marriage, rapid urbanization, and the higher cost of raising kids.

The aging of China’s society deepened in 2025, with the population of those aged over 60 standing at 323 million and making up 23% of the population, up one percentage point from 2024, the data shows.

A staggering half of the country’s population could be over 60 by 2100, according to United Nations projections – a reality with potentially far-reaching implications, for not only China’s economy but also its ambitions to rival the United States as a military power.

Chinese leader Xi Jinping has evoked the need for “population security” and made the “development of a high-quality population” a national priority. He’s also overseen a push to automate and upgrade the country’s manufacturing powerhouse, replacing human with robotic labor.

China’s central government last year began offering annual cash bonuses to families with children under the age of three, amended rules to streamline marriage registration, and kicked off a scheme for free public preschool.

Those add to a raft of incentives local governments have tried in recent years to boost birth rates – from tax breaks and financial assistance for buying and renting homes, to cash handouts and extended maternity leave.

Analysts expect more policies or incentives to support births and marriage in the year ahead. But many believe it will be impossible to stem the decline, especially as young people struggle to find jobs and eye the high costs of raising children, while women say the uneven burden of childrearing discourages them from starting or expanding families. — Agencies