China’s birth rates dropped to a record low last year, despite a desperate government campaign to boost the number of young people marrying and having children. Data released by officials on Monday showed that the country’s birth rate had fallen to 5.63 per 1,000 people, while its death rate rose to 8.04 per 1,000 people – the highest since 1968. It means only 7.92 million babies were born in China last year, the lowest number since records began in 1949.

The ruling Communist Party introduced a 13% value-added tax on condoms and other contraceptives on January 1 following a decades-long exemption in its latest bid to shift the demographic trend, after scrapping the longstanding one-child policy in 2016. China has one of the lowest fertility rates in the world, with around one birth per woman, and is also one of the most expensive countries in which to raise a child, according to the YuWa Population Research Institute.

The tax on condoms, birth control pills and intrauterine devices, alongside new exemptions for childscare services and marriage introduction agencies, are among the oft-ridiculed ways officials have tried to backpedal on the unforeseen impact of the one-child policy on China.

It was introduced in 1979 on the misguided principle that unmandated reproduction would see population numbers spiral out of control.

Instead, China has born the brunt of a global trend towards young people having fewer children in recent years, naturally suffering more than its counterparts around the globe because of a shortfall in citizens of child-bearing age.

It has also meant an increasingly elderly-skewed demographic, with 2022 marking a turning point, when deaths exceeded births for the first time by 850,000.

The gap has grown in the intervening years, reaching a new high of 3.39 million in 2025, and the state-run Chinese Academy of Sciences has warned that the country’s pension system could run out of money by 2035.

The declining birth rate is also due to socioeconomic reasons, however – including the high cost of childcare and education, job uncertainty and traditional expectations of women as homemakers.

“Much of China’s population decline is rooted in entrenched structural reasons,” Yun Zhou, assistant professor of sociology at the University of Michigan, told Reuters.

“Without fundamental structural transformations – from enhancing the social safety net to eliminating gender discrimination – the trend of population decline cannot be reversed.”