China’s birth rate fell last year to its lowest level on record. In 2025 alone, according to official government data released on Monday, the number of births fell by 17 percent year-over-year.
The Chinese Communist Party is learning the hard way that societal engineering, even if it “succeeds” according to the wishes of central planners, comes with horrible costs and can be irreversible.
From 1979 to 2015, Beijing imposed its one-child policy. The Chinese government acted on the “population bomb” fears that were common among many Western elites in the 1970s. Unlike in the West, where democracy restrained the most extreme forms of population control, China went all-in.
Forced abortions and sterilizations, combined with fines and propaganda, snuffed out many millions of lives. Unborn girls were particularly victimized because of sex-selective abortions. This system sustained itself long after its barbaric consequences became indisputable because of bureaucratic bloat and inertia.
The Communist Party lifted the child cap to two in 2015 and then abolished it altogether in 2021. Yet China’s population has now been falling for the last four years. India surpassed it as the world’s most populous country in 2023.
Now comes the latest move to juice the birth rate: the regime is ending a value-added tax exemption for contraceptives, which had been in place since the VAT was introduced in 1993. The VAT is China’s national consumption tax, similar to what many European countries use. Effective this month, its 13 percent rate applies to the sales of condoms and birth control pills. Tax-policy encouragement of contraception is over, but will making condoms 13 percent more expensive really lead to more babies?
China today is a country where many young people have no siblings. Because the one-child policy lasted so long, their parents also have no siblings, so they have no aunts, uncles, or cousins, either.
That is complicating China’s war-planning efforts because the massive casualties required to invade Taiwan would mean many families lose their only child, who they’re counting on to take care of them in old age.
Decades of sex-selective abortions have resulted in severe gender imbalances. Because there are tens of millions more men than women, dating or marriage — let alone procreation — is impossible for many.
Intense pressure on the children who are born, plus child-raising costs that are among the highest in the world when adjusted for income, make the prospect of family life unattractive, even as loneliness eternally grates on the soul.
Taxes on contraception aren’t going to change that basic picture. Subsidies to parents won’t either.
Economist Milton Friedman once said that if you put government in charge of the Sahara Desert, there would be a shortage of sand. It turns out that if you put communists in charge of China, they’re capable of causing a shortage of people.
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