The CCP's Own Numbers Reveal a Demographic Paradox

In 1971, when China had roughly 850 million people, the Communist Party became so worried about overpopulation that it launched a nationwide birth control campaign. A few years later, it officially introduced the one-child policy and banned second child. The message was simple, China has too many people. Fast forward to 2016, China's official population had grown to 1.38 billion. The one-child policy was abolished. People could have a second child. Five years later, when China's population supposedly reached a record 1.41 billion, Beijing introduced the third child or three-child policy. Suddenly, the message has changed. China doesn't have enough people. And yes, you can have three children now. Have you ever stopped and thought about how strange that is? When China had 850 million people, the government said there were too many Chinese. And when China supposedly had 1.4 billion people, the government decided there weren't enough. How exactly are we supposed to interpret that? In January, numbers released by China's National Bureau of Statistics indicated that the country's population decline is continuing. In 2025, China's total new birth tanked 17% from a year ago and recorded just 7.92 million births last year. What alarmed people the most is the total new birth at 7.92 million. To appreciate how extraordinary this number is, consider this. The last time China likely produced fewer than 8 million babies in a year was 120 years ago, around 1900, when China's population was roughly 430 million. Today, China officially claims to have more than 1.4 billion people, yet it produced only 7.92 million newborns. Can you imagine a country with 1.4 billion people producing fewer than 8 million babies a year? Just 10 years ago, in 2016, China recorded nearly 18 million new births. Today, that number has fallen by more than a half. The speed of the decline is astonishing. Using official data, I compared China's population trend with its birth trend between 1985 and 2025. The results are striking. In 1985, China's population was 1.06 billion. New birth was 22.2 million. 40 years later, the population rose to 1.4 billion. New birth tanked to 7.92 million. Over the past 40 years, population increased from 1 billion to 1.4 billion, while annual new births collapsed from 22 million to 7.9 million. In other words, China added 345 million people, yet lost more than 14 million newborns per year. Or put another way, China supposedly added a population larger than the entire United States, yet it lost nearly two-thirds of its newborns. That is the demographic paradox reviewed by the CCP's own statistics. But it tells us something important. China's demographic crisis did not begin in 2022, when the population officially started shrinking. It began decades earlier, when birth started collapsing, while the alleged growing population masked the problem. If you look at the chart, for over 40 years, total population bars were still moving up, while line indicating new births tanked dramatically. By the time China's population allegedly reached its official peak in 2021, the demographic foundation underneath it had been weakening for decades. Therefore, I don't believe China's population is 1.4 billion. It probably never reached that high. The collapse in new birth is the evidence, and I'm using CCP's own numbers. Now, a Chinese population expert agrees with me. His name is Liang Zhongtang. I believe he now lives outside China. He was speaking with Taiwanese media about China's population. He was a former vice president of the Shaanxi Academy of Social Sciences and a former expert advisor to China's National Family Planning Commission. He argues that China's true population may be significantly lower than the official number of 1.4 billion. His reasoning is surprisingly simple. China began conducting modern population census in 1982. Every 10 years, there's a full census with smaller sample surveys conducted in between. According to Mr. Liang, throughout the 1980s, China's population was growing by more than 10 million people per year. That became the baseline assumption built into the statistical system. The problem, according to him, is that the demographic reality began changing in the 1990s. He said the large baby boom generation born after 1962 gradually completed marriage and childbearing. Fertility began falling sharply. According to him, fertility started falling in the 1990s. But, he said, statistical authorities believe the declining birth numbers didn't match previous projections and were therefore treated as underreporting. In other words, when the numbers came in lower than expected, officials often assumed people were hiding birth rather than questioning the assumptions themselves. Over time, Mr. Liang argues, this led to a systemic overestimation of both population size and fertility rates. His conclusion is blunt. China does not have 1.4 billion people. Let's now take a look at fertility rates. These are the official fertility rates by the decade. According to the official census data, China's fertility rate somehow rose back to 1.3 in 2020. Mr. Liang argues that this makes very little sense. Think about what happened between 2000 and 2020. China experienced enormous social changes, soaring housing prices, delayed marriage, rising education costs, declining marriage rates, and a low new birth. Yet somehow, after 20 years of dramatic social transformation, the fertility rate ends up exactly where it was in 2000. Mr. Liang finds that difficult to believe. Even more puzzling, the official fertility rate supposedly increased from 1.18 in 2010 to 1.3 in 2020. Yet during that same decade, China's annual births were falling by nearly 1 million babies per year on average. So those numbers simply do not fit together. How could you have fertility rate increase when your new birth declined so dramatically? And now let's take a look at another set of official data. On May 22nd, the National Bureau of Statistics released a population survey report showing that average Chinese household now contains just 2.52 persons. In other words, China has moved beyond even the traditional three-person nuclear family. The country's family structure appears to be entering a stage of profound fragmentation. Historical census data, as you can see, reveals a long-term trend. It was 4.41 persons per household in 1982, and then it went down to 3.96, and then 3.44 in year 2000. It keeps going down. So over the past four decades, the average Chinese household has lost roughly two family members. This represents one of the most dramatic examples in modern history of family structure shrinking and the side effects of state policy and demographic change. Again, this is just based on official data. The reality could be much worse. Now, there is another country that experienced a remarkably similar decline in household size during the same period, and that's South Korea, the very country with the lowest fertility rate in the world. So I compared South Korea's household size and fertility trends with China's, and I found something interesting. So the decline in household size is almost identical between the two countries over the 40 years. China went from 4.4 people per household to 2.5. South Korea went from 4.5 to 2.3. That's almost the same. But when we compare fertility rates, something appears off. South Korea's fertility rate fell below one before 2020, and eventually dropped to around 0.75. Meanwhile, China's official fertility rates were lower than South Korea's in the year 2000 and 2010, but it suddenly went higher in 2020. It's now at 1.3, while Korea was only 0.84. Think about it. How is that possible? How can China maintain a substantially higher fertility rate while its household size is collapsing, its marriage rate is declining, and its annual new births are falling dramatically? To me, those trends point in different directions. My conclusion is that China's actual fertility rate has very likely fallen below one. And that brings us back to Mr. Liang Zhongtang. He believes the same thing. He said that China's fertility rate may actually be lower than South Korea's. South Korea is widely known as the country with the lowest fertility rate. In recent years, the country's fertility rate has fluctuated between 0.73 and 0.81. Yet China's official estimate for 2024 was around one. But Liang believes that number is too high. His argument is straightforward. He said, even after accounting for the shrinking number of women of childbearing age, the collapsing annual new births has been so dramatic that China's actual fertility rate may have already fallen below 0.7. If that's true, China will no longer merely have a low fertility problem. It will have a fertility rate lower than South Korea's. Then one of the biggest demographic stories of the 21st century may not be South Korea's population crisis. It's China's. And if you really step back and think about it, China's demographic crisis is much worse than South Korea's. So with all that said, you may ask me the ultimate question, how many people does China actually have? I cannot give you a definitive demographic answer, but I can offer a logical observation by going back to 800 million versus the 1.4 billion paradox. When China had 800 million people, the regime decided that there were too many people. And now the regime decided that everyone need to have three kids. What does that tell you? China does not have 800 million people by CCP's own logic. If you think about it, that's quite a journey. And the strangest part is that we've been all following Beijing's narrative for all this time. So that's my answer to you. It's not a mathematical answer. It's not a demographic answer. In fact, I don't think anyone knows the exact population that China has. The only way to find out is by doing a census, an honest census.