China’s population has already peaked. The turning point came in 2022, when the country recorded its first population decline in six decades. By the end of 2024, mainland China’s population stood at 1.408 billion, a decrease of 1.39 million from the year before. India officially surpassed China as the world’s most populous country in April 2023.
How the Decline Unfolded
China’s total population grew for decades under the momentum of earlier generations, even as birth rates slowed. But several trend lines converged in the early 2020s. Annual births dropped to around 9 million in 2023, with a fertility rate of roughly 1.0 children per woman, the second lowest among major economies. For context, a country needs a fertility rate of about 2.1 just to maintain its population over time without immigration.
Marriage registrations tell a similar story. In 2024, only 6.1 million couples registered to marry, a 20% drop from 2023 and the lowest figure since 1980. The average age of first marriage has climbed steadily: from about 25 in 2010 to nearly 29 by 2020. In Shanghai, it now sits above 30. Fewer marriages, happening later, translate directly into fewer births.
Why Birth Rates Keep Falling
The forces behind China’s declining fertility go well beyond the legacy of the one-child policy, which ended in 2015. Urbanization has reshaped how people think about family size. Research published in Frontiers in Public Health found that the negative influence of urbanization on fertility has gradually outweighed the lingering effects of past birth policies. City living brings higher housing costs, longer working hours, and a shift in expectations around parenting. Raising a child in a Chinese city is expensive, and many young adults are choosing to delay or forgo parenthood entirely.
The government’s policy responses have had little measurable effect. China moved from a two-child policy to a three-child policy in 2021, but analysis in the Journal of Family Medicine and Primary Care concluded bluntly that the birth policy “may not have improved the birth rate.” Researchers noted that the real bottleneck is economic: the cost of housing, education, childcare, and insurance. Without substantial financial relief for families, simply allowing more children doesn’t change behavior. Some proposals include extending compulsory education, expanding maternity insurance, and offering subsidies for multi-child families, but implementation remains uneven.
The Working-Age Population Peaked Even Earlier
While the total population peaked around 2022, China’s working-age population (ages 16 to 60) actually peaked back in 2010. That’s the demographic group that drives economic output. Research from the journal China Economic Review projected that effective labor input would grow at just 0.40% annually between 2015 and 2030, compared to a negative growth rate of 0.60% for the raw working-age population count. The gap between those two numbers reflects gains from education and skills, but the underlying labor pool is shrinking.
At the other end of the age spectrum, China is aging fast. Projections from China’s State Council Information Office estimate that the number of people aged 60 and older will surpass 400 million around 2035, making up more than 30% of the total population. That ratio puts enormous pressure on pension systems, healthcare, and the smaller working-age cohort expected to support them.
How Far Could the Population Fall
The range of projections is wide, and the differences hinge on whether fertility stabilizes or keeps dropping. The United Nations’ 2024 revision, which uses a medium-variant scenario, projects China’s population settling around 800 million by the early 2070s. That would represent a loss of roughly 600 million people from the peak, a decline larger than the entire population of the European Union.
More aggressive forecasts paint a starker picture. A research team at the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, one of the first institutions to predict the 2022 downturn, now projects China’s population falling to approximately 525 million by 2100. That would be more than halving from today’s figure. The difference between the UN and Shanghai Academy projections comes down largely to assumptions about whether young Chinese couples will start having more children in coming decades. If marriage and birth rates stay near current record lows, the steeper decline becomes more plausible.
What This Means in Practical Terms
For people inside China, the effects will unfold gradually but reshape daily life. A shrinking labor force means employers will compete harder for workers, which could push wages up but also accelerate automation. Elder care will become a defining challenge: by 2035, roughly one in three Chinese people will be over 60, and many will have only one adult child, or none, to help support them. Housing markets in smaller cities are already softening as young people concentrate in a handful of major urban centers.
Globally, China’s demographic shift rebalances economic and geopolitical weight. India, now the most populous country, has a much younger median age and decades of workforce growth ahead. China’s shrinking consumer base will eventually affect global demand for everything from automobiles to agricultural imports. The speed of this transition is historically unprecedented: no country of China’s size has ever aged this quickly, and the policy tools to reverse such deep fertility declines have proven ineffective everywhere they’ve been tried.