As Xi Jinping purges one general after another, seeking to further consolidate his power, the population at large remains quiescent.
Even as his digital dictatorship tightens controls and the economy slows down, there are no mass demonstrations rocking the streets of Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou like those occurring in Tehran.
But could the Chinese people be protesting Xi in another, quieter way, namely, by not bringing children into the China that he rules with an increasingly iron fist?
Note that the one-child policy was suspended in 2016 because China’s birth rates were already beginning to collapse in the first few years after Xi took office.
Birth rates in China have continued to crater in the years since, falling from 17.86 million in 2016 to only 7.92 million in 2025, a decline of some 56 percent. In recent years, the drop-off in births has picked up speed.
In fact, China’s fertility now seems to be in freefall.
In the past year alone, according to the PRC’s National Bureau of Statistics, the birth count fell by an unprecedented 17 percent.
The drop is so shocking that the usual explanations for declining birth rates hardly seem to apply. Other Asian countries that underwent rapid urbanization and modernization also saw family size shrink, but not at this calamitous pace.
So what’s going on?
As always in China, the first question to ask is: Are the numbers real? Metrics in China are often massaged to put the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and its leadership in a good light, after all.
But this shocking birth crash is hardly good news. On the contrary, it is very bad news for China’s future in a multitude of ways, so it is unlikely to be Party propaganda.
Even the famine years after the Great Leap Forward, when an estimated 45 million people starved to death, still saw 14 million births in 1960 and 12 million births in 1961, many millions more than now.
China has not been this barren of babies for centuries.
University of Wisconsin Professor Yi Fuxian notes that China has now regressed to birth levels last seen “in 1738, when the national population was only about 150 million.” That was three centuries ago, when China’s population was merely one-tenth of what it is now.
China is not now in the grip of a famine or plague, but people are reproducing—or not reproducing—like they are.
Part of what we are seeing now is clearly the downstream effects of the one-child policy.
Hundreds of millions of women were brutally aborted and sterilized from 1980 on by officials determined to enforce a simple rule: One child for city dwellers, two children for village folk.
The one-child policy only ended in 2016. This means that millions of Chinese women now in their 30s and early 40s—ages when women in other countries are still having children—were sterilized a decade or more ago, thus barring them from the baby-making business forever.
Add to this the decades-long winnowing out of girls from the population by the twin evils of female infanticide and sex-selection abortion. Chinese families strongly prefer sons to daughters to continue the family line, but sons can’t have children unless they find a wife. And wives are in short supply everywhere in today’s China.
Then there is the corrosive effect of anti-natal propaganda. For nearly two generations, couples were bombarded with the message that, for the good of the country, they should have only one child. That belief has become embedded in the popular culture, leading to many young couples deciding—this time for their own good, not for the state’s—to stop at one. Or none.
It is one of history’s ironies that the daughters of women who were forcibly aborted and sterilized are now voluntarily sterilizing themselves.
This “voluntary one-child policy”—as we might call it—will prove fatal to China’s future if it continues. With the population declining by half each generation, it will not take long to empty out the country that was for centuries the most populous on Earth.
Chinese leaders have long regarded “the masses” as an inexhaustible resource, and their fertility as something that could be turned off and back on like a water faucet. But today this resource is drying up. The masses have been filling more coffins than cradles for at least the past five years, and deaths are increasingly outnumbering births.
The Party’s increasingly frantic efforts to turn the fertility faucet back on have had little effect. Despite adopting a three-child policy in 2021 and offering ever-increasing tax breaks, extended maternal leave, and other subsidies, births continue to plummet.
The Party has not even been able to mobilize its own members. Efforts to encourage the 100 million members of the CCP to “shoulder the responsibility” for boosting the birth rate and do their patriotic duty by having three children have fallen on deaf ears. No spike in cadre birth rates has been noted.
In the days of the one-child policy, powerful officials frequently violated the limit with impunity, having second, third, and fourth children. Now they are again ignoring the Party line—in the other direction—rejecting the call to have a second child, much less a third.
Add to this the growing economic pressure on China’s middle class, in which the ongoing effects of the trade war, the high cost of housing, and the cost of raising and educating children all tend to drive down both marriage and birth rates.
Nor are China’s hardscrabble villagers getting back into the baby-making business, seeing little future in farming their small plots of land. The seasonal factory jobs that created opportunities for outside income are also drying up as the Trump administration’s tariffs hit home.
But the sputtering economy cannot fully explain the sudden, disastrous decline in birth rates. It is as if the entire country has fallen into the grip of a deep cultural, even spiritual, malaise.
As Xi Jinping has consolidated power over the years, what was once billed as the “China Dream” has come more and more to resemble a waking nightmare—a slow-rolling Cultural Revolution of propaganda campaigns, persecutions, and political purges.
As the surveillance state has become more and more entrenched—and more and more obsessed with control—it is not just minorities like the Uyghurs and Tibetans, or religious believers like the Falun Gong and Christians, who are targeted and controlled, but the entire population.
Even the promise of free expression offered by the rise of social media has been taken away by government censors, dispiriting and demoralizing young adults in particular.
Many are not just opting out of marriage, family, and careers by “lying flat,” they have gone on to actively sabotage their own prospects by “letting it rot.”
Xi’s censors have railed against this growing protest movement, but it is helpless to stop it. Riot squads and reeducation camps don’t work on people who have simply given up on life. Nor are they any help in raising the marriage and birth rates.
Children are living, breathing, laughing, loving expressions of hope in the future. Xi’s dictatorship, by extinguishing that hope of a better future in the hearts of the people, is also stripping it bare of children.
At the end of the day, communism may prove to be the best contraceptive ever invented.
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This article was originally published in the Epoch Times on January 31, 2026.
