China at Davos, GDP growth hits target, and population decline deepens
What Beijing is telling the world as growth holds and demographics worsen
Welcome back to What’s Happening in China, your weekly China brief.
China’s population declined for the fourth year in a row in 2025, according to new data from the National Bureau of Statistics, falling by 3.39 million to 1.40489 billion.
While Beijing has rolled out a growing list of measures to counter the demographic slide—including, most recently, imposing a 13% VAT on condoms and other contraceptives for the first time in three decades—economic and social pressures, combined with shifting attitudes toward marriage and family, make the trend impossible extremely hard to reverse.
Births dropped to 7.92 million last year, down from 9.54 million in 2024, representing a 17% decline and a birth rate of just 5.63 per 1,000 people, the lowest since the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949.
The implications extend well beyond family policy. A shrinking and aging population will weigh on economic growth, strain public finances, and complicate the trade-offs between short-term stimulus and long-term sustainability, at a time when the country is already grappling with mounting structural constraints, including local government debt, a deepening property crisis, and external pressures in tech and trade—pressures that shaped Beijing’s messaging at Davos this week.
I wouldn’t be surprised if China’s population drops below 1.4 billion in 2026. That is, if it hasn’t already, given how notoriously unreliable official statistics can be.
Let’s jump into it.
— PC
Through the Lens
In Focus
I. The adult in the room(?)
China’s Vice Premier He Lifeng positioned his country as a champion of the rules-based international order Tuesday, in a speech at the World Economic Forum that indirectly attacked the Trump administration.
“The unilateral acts and trade deals of certain countries clearly violate the fundamental principles and rules of the [World Trade Organization], and severely impact the global economic and trade order,” said He, adding that the world shouldn’t slide back into “the law of the jungle, where the strong bully the weak.”
The remarks come amid unprecedented tensions between the European Union and the U.S. over Washington’s threats to annex Greenland by force. The escalation has already led President Donald Trump to threaten a group of European countries with new duties after they sent troops to the North Atlantic island.
Read: China pitches itself as reliable partner amid Trump threats (Politico)
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