Beijing
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China clocked its lowest birth rate on record in 2025 as its population shrank for the fourth year in a row, deepening a demographic challenge that could drag on the world’s second-largest economy for decades to come.
The rate fell to 5.63 births per 1,000 people in 2025, beneath 2023’s low of 6.39 per 1,000. 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.
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,…