China’s Birth Rate Falls to Lowest Level in 75 Years After Population Control Kills Millions

China’s birth rate has fallen to its lowest level since 1949, the direct result of decades of coercive population control policies that killed hundreds of millions of people through forced abortions, infanticide and sterilizations.

Official figures show the birth rate dropped to 5.63 per 1,000 people last year. China’s population is now projected to fall below 1.25 billion by mid-century.

The one-child policy, enforced for nearly 40 years, produced more than 330 million abortions and 196 million sterilizations by 2013. The program relied on massive financial penalties, forced abortions, sterilizations, family separations, infanticide, and resulted in the concealment of unauthorized children.

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Despite later policy shifts allowing more children, China’s total fertility rate stands at just 1.2 births per woman — barely half the level needed to replace the population.

Trip.com cofounder James Liang has warned that the resulting population decline threatens China’s future.

“We need more people to innovate,” Liang said. “That is why population and having children is important. If we have a declining population, not only will our ability to innovate diminish, but we will lose our capacity to stay in control of innovation itself.”

Liang added that the amount of human resources devoted to research and development determines output in patents and technological progress. He described the problem as increasingly global, noting that last year two-thirds of the world’s population lived in countries with fertility rates below replacement level.

Critics say the original policies inflicted deep and lasting damage.

Reggie Littlejohn, founder of Women’s Rights Without Frontiers, stated that even the shift to a three-child policy “is nothing to celebrate.” She called for the complete abolition of coercive population control, saying it is not the government’s role to decide how many children couples may have.

“A ‘three-child’ policy keeps the womb police in business,” Littlejohn said. “They will still be tracking women’s fertility and birth and punishing those who find themselves ‘illegally pregnant’ … These gross violations of women’s rights and human rights must be stopped, effective immediately.”

A Fulbright scholar who lived in China during the later years of the one-child policy described how the restrictions shaped people’s thinking. Many young adults said they planned to have only one child, citing not only cost but their duty to follow government rules.

“It’s good for us,” they told the scholar. Others said plainly, “My government tells me it is good.”

Current government incentives, including an annual subsidy of roughly 3,600 yuan ($500) per child under age three, have failed to reverse the trend. Young people continue to point to the high cost of raising children and job insecurity as reasons to limit family size.

Liang has urged broader changes, including more support for women and greater involvement from fathers in child-rearing.

“We need more people, otherwise we’ll just yield our control to AI,” he said.

The long-term consequences of policies that treated human life as a number to be controlled continue to shape China’s demographic crisis, leaving the country facing fewer workers, innovators, and families after millions of lives were ended before birth.