May 13, 2026: The Chinese population is shrinking and is now somewhere between 700 and 800 million. The official claim is 1.4 billion and the government claims that it was 1.5 billion 12 years ago. These calculations are made using openly available economic data. Last year China proclaimed that the national fertility rate was 1.0, when a rate of 2.1 is required to sustain current population numbers. This is one of many indicators that China is running out of people, new births and Chinese willing to get married. The fertility rate, or number of children born to each woman, is among the lowest in the world and nothing the government can do seems able to change it. Last year, fewer than 8 million children were born, compared to the reported ten million in 2018. The 2025 births were the lowest since birth data was first recorded in 1949, right after the Chinese Communists seized control of the country. It gets worse because 11.3 million people died in 2025, the highest death rate since 1968. Worse, China's population shrank by 3.4 million people in one year. Deaths have now exceeded births for four consecutive years. There were only six million marriages last year, down from over 10 million in 2018. Fewer marriages today means fewer births in three to five years. It gets worse in the coming years and decades.

The 16 to 59 years old working-age population last year fell by 6.6 million to 851 million. Worse, the number over 60 climbed by 13 million to 323 million, representing 23 percent of the national population. This trend will get worse. By 2080 there will be more than one retiree for every working-age person. This will require substantial changes to the taxation of workers and the old age benefits systems. The results could be catastrophic as working age Chinese flee the country to avoid unbearably high tax rates. Without those taxes, the government would have to take extreme measures to support, or even eliminate the high number of retirees.

The Chinese government is desperate to increase the birth rate. This includes high taxes on condoms and economic incentives for couples who have children. This includes child subsidies, reduced kindergarten fees, and extended honeymoon. Marriageable age Chinese are watching youth unemployment approaching 20 percent. Even when they get a job, there is not much money left to support a child while concurrently supporting two sets of aging parents. The government is offering little in the way of help.

By the mid-2030s China’s population will decline nearly 60 million. China spent $425 billion last year just subsidizing its pension system. That number will keep growing year by year over the next few decades.

Chinese women no longer accept the traditional role of wife and mother. Many refuse to marry Chinese men, instead seeking American or European spouses. Americans are preferred because they help with childcare and housework. Most Chinese women don’t have access to foreign men and simply stay single.

China continues trying to make the best of a bad situation they cannot seem to control; a shrinking population, a workforce that is shrinking even faster and markets for its exports leveling off. The workforce shrinkage raises dire doubts about Chinese export statistics as those simply remaining where they were six years ago entails an unbelievable rate of labor productivity increases.

These three factors mean China’s Ponzi scheme economy has reached its limits with substantial declines now in progress. Other East Asian nations have similar problems, some not involving on-going Ponzi scheme financial systems, after having experienced a sustained economic boom that has moved much of the population into the middle-class. China too has prospered and given several hundred million Chinese prosperous middle class lives. This is unprecedented in Chinese history. One of the downsides of this prosperity is that couples have fewer children. When poor, families have more children because that is how people can create some support for their old age. Children do that and, in the absence of savings, children have traditionally supported their elderly parents. Because of all the prosperity, that traditional form of old age care is eroding.

A prosperous China is now suffering from this, with fewer babies born each year to replace those dying. The current Japanese birth rate is 1.39. In 2008 it was noted that China’s birth rate had fallen to 1.8 births per woman and that is way beneath the replacement rate of 2.1. It has since declined to 0.65 and, worse, the now repealed One-Child policy fatally reduced the future number of females of child-bearing age. The result is that the absolute number of new Chinese births for the rest of the century will be a small fraction of what China’s overall population would otherwise indicate. China’s total population began a rapid collapse and reached 800 million in the 2020s instead of the predicted 2030s.

The biggest current problem is the growth of retirees with a steadily shrinking number of workers to support them. Proposals to allow more births run into arguments about limited resources. Japan is way ahead in this population decline curve, and China does not want to join them, but no one has yet come up with an acceptable alternative. The impact of fewer births in urban areas over two decades ago is showing up in growing shortages of skilled labor. The costs of manufacturing high tech items is growing, forcing Chinese manufacturers to move more factories to nations with cheaper labor. The military is giving the troops a raise, especially the technicians. Otherwise, it can’t recruit them, or keep them. South Korea already has a birth rate of 1.11, which is lower than Japan’s. The American birth rate is 1.66 but most Western nations have lower rates. For Europe as a whole, the rate is .98.

Chinese manufacturing activity has been shrinking since 2022 and that is one of several indicators that the Chinese economy is in trouble. There are also some epic failures of infrastructure, with province electrical blackouts increasingly common. The problems are largely self-inflicted. The shrinking of Chinese economic activity is the result of several different economic problems, including consumers not resuming their pre-covid19 spending habits. Less consumer spending was not expected. None of this should be a surprise because all the problems have occurred in China before, but not all at once. Paying attention to Chinese history is a respected popular tradition for basing major decisions on. Chinese leader Xi Jinping came to power in 2012 and initially concentrated on reinforcing government control of the military. Xi, like most Chinese leaders, pays more attention to history than foreign counterparts do. Chinese military history is measured in thousands of years while Westerners in most cases have only a few centuries of it and don’t pay as much attention to past experiences as China does.

Chinese economic history over those long periods did not change much either. It was largely feudal and, since 1910, China has been trying to develop a form of government capable of handling economic problems more effectively. Xi Jinping has had some success and recently saw the Chinese banking sector improving to the point where it can assist in reviving the economy. The economy is still in bad shape, with too much debt, and many foreign companies pulling out of China while too many Chinese companies are barely staying in business with a growing number slipping into insolvency and bankruptcy.