“Imploded” might be too strong a word, but Communist China just entered the growing ranks of nations with a fertility rate below a single birth per woman — less than half the replacement level.
The implosion might not be here quite yet, but it is coming.
“Last week, Beijing’s release of China’s national birth count for 2025 left demographers stunned,” Nicholas Eberstadt wrote for the New York Post on Saturday. “The national birth total plummeted by over 17% from 2024 to 2025,” a drop that is “almost never seen in stable modern societies.”
Stick a pin in that last part. I’ll come back to it shortly.
Eberstadt called the figures “only the latest readings from the astonishing birth crash that’s commenced under Xi Jinping’s rule: a drop by over half in just eight years that shows no sign as yet of abating.”
“The new birth figures imply that the total fertility rate [TFR] has finally fallen below one birth per woman,” 10 ironic years after Xi ended China’s notorious One Child Policy.
It’s a short list of countries with a TFR of less than one: South Korea, Taiwan, Ukraine, Singapore, Thailand, and now China.
Demographics move slowly, but absent a swift turnaround, the movement is inexorably toward decline.
Women must bear an average of 2.1 children for a population to remain steady. Anything above that, and a population grows. Anything less, and it slowly shrinks. At a TFR of 1.3, some experts hypothesize a nation enters the Low Fertility Trap, where each generation is roughly 50% smaller than the preceding generation — and that there’s little hope of escape.
When a nation — like China in 2025 — goes under 1 TFR, they’re in what some demographers call the Ultra-Low Crisis. That’s when “Shrinkanomics” starts to kick in as the tax base grows ever smaller, schools close, and the healthcare system is overwhelmed by a massive elderly population supported by a tiny, dwindling workforce.
China isn’t there yet, but absent one of those nearly impossible turnarounds, the country will lose roughly 200 million people by 2050 — a loss over-represented by children and the working-age population. By 2100, China’s population (currently best-estimated at about 1.25 billion by Dr. Yi Fuxian of the University of Wisconsin-Madison) could drop to between 390 and 440 million souls.
Economically, Beijing seems to believe that AI will allow it to automate its way to continued prosperity, even with a population that will shrink rapidly over the next 25 years, and radically in the half-century after that.
And — who knows? — maybe it’ll do just that.
Before going any further, let me remind you that nobody really knows what goes on in China. The official numbers are most often lies reported up the chain and faithfully repeated further up the chain as wishful thinking-as-fact. So when I say “nobody really knows what goes on in China,” that includes the Party members in charge of keeping track of what’s really going on in China, right up to and including Comrade Xi.
Even the country’s export figures — which had previously been largely reliable — are suspect. Last year’s record $1.2 trillion surplus has yet to show up in banking figures or foreign currency reserves. Yet flat imports suggest that even if China did send $1.2 trillion worth of goods overseas, consumer demand remains in a slump. We just don’t know which is true, both, or neither. Which is my entire point.
So I include this next item, not because I necessarily think there is or was some kind of coup attempt going on in China, but because Jennifer Zeng’s analysis at least appears to dovetail with Eberstadt’s comment about birthrates and “stable modern societies.”
Here you go:
🔥 Breaking: It is NOT over yet.
Latest first-hand information: Zhang Youxia case is far from settled.
Both sides (Xi and Zhang) are currently locked in a dispute over the legality of the arrest. Zhang’s family members and some of his subordinates have publicly expressed… https://t.co/wbG2DMEUma pic.twitter.com/jqLGJFFYTF
— Inconvenient Truths — Jennifer Zeng Reports (@jenniferzeng97) January 25, 2026
Fascinating reading, even if it proves mostly fiction.
But we do know as a matter of record that Comrade Xi certainly is on another purge-binge of senior military commanders. And as PJ Media’s own Richard Fernandez posted this weekend, “Any armed force mentally and operationally agile enough to challenge the United States is also an intolerable threat to Chinese Communist Party.”
It’s impossible to say for sure what’s really going on in China, but that’s hardly indicative of a society confident enough in itself to start making babies again.
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