Declaring childbirth a patriotic act. Nagging newlyweds about family planning. Taxing condoms.

To get its citizens to have babies, the Chinese Communist Party has pulled every lever.

The efforts have largely failed. For the fourth year in a row, China reported more deaths than births in 2025 as its birthrate plunged to a record low, leaving its population smaller and older.

The government on Monday said 7.92 million babies were born last year, down from 9.54 million in 2024. The number of people who died in 2025, 11.31 million, continued to climb. The latest population figures were reported alongside economic data that showed China’s economy grew 5 per cent in 2025.

The number of births for every 1,000 people fell to 5.63, the lowest level on record since the founding of the People’s Republic of China, according to official government data.

Around the world, governments are contending with falling birthrates. But the problem is more acute for China: Fewer babies mean fewer future workers to support a rapidly growing cohort of retirees. A worsening economy has made addressing the challenge even more difficult.

“China is facing a severe challenge posed by an extremely low fertility rate,” said Wu Fan, a professor of family policy at Nankai University in eastern China.

China’s top leaders have redoubled their efforts to try to boost the national birthrate enough to reverse the decline, something that demographers have said is probably impossible now that China has crossed a demographic threshold where its fertility rate, a measure of the number of children a woman has over a lifetime, is so low that its population is shrinking.

Xi Jinping, China’s top leader, has called for a "new type of marriage and childbearing culture", entreating officials to influence young people’s views on "love and marriage, fertility and family". Local officials have responded with increasingly ham-handed measures to get citizens to have babies, including tracking women’s menstrual cycles and issuing guidelines to reduce abortions that are medically unnecessary.

Many of the measures have been met with a collective shrug by young people who do not want to start a family.

On January 1, officials placed a 13 per cent value-added tax on contraceptive drugs and condoms, a move that has been met with a mix of indifference, mockery and derision.

Jonathan Zhu, 28, said the price increase would have little effect on his habits. “I’ll still use them,” he said, citing financial pressure as his reason for delaying fatherhood until marriage. His girlfriend, Hu Tingyan, 26, agreed, noting that the cost of condoms does not influence her willingness to have children. “I don’t feel the time is right yet,” she said.