Analysis: China's birth-rate struggles underscore its millennia-long
effort to manage 'the masses'
[January 20, 2026]
By TED ANTHONY
BEIJING (AP) — From ancient times until today, an enormous population
has been a foundational way for China to project its strength. But
anxiety about managing so many mouths has always loomed. “China has a
population of 600 million people, and we must never forget this fact,”
Mao Zedong said in 1957, shortly before setting off a calamitous famine.
China's masses, though, are getting to be less massive. And that’s a
problem.
Birth rate numbers released Monday, the lowest since Mao's Communists
established the People's Republic in 1949, are the latest development in
a millennia-long struggle in China, where producing children and
refreshing the population of the young have been central to the national
conversation since the country's earliest days.
China’s population stands at 1.404 billion today, down 3 million from
the previous year. And the central government's challenge remains much
as it has always been: to manage a citizenry that both enhances the
country’s strength and claims enormous resources.
But various factors — policy, generational change and general evolution
of the way people live — have officials concerned that there won't be
enough young Chinese people to build the tomorrow they want. This week’s
numbers illustrate how complicated the problem remains.
The ripples of the one-child policy
It's likely that urban Chinese of the 1980s could barely imagine the
situation today — a society where the government is pushing families to
have more — up to three — children.
The one-child policy, officially instituted in 1980 four years after
Mao's death, was designed to curb a growing population. It restricted
Chinese couples to a single offspring and eventually, in many cases,
punished them if they didn't comply. The rationale: At that time, under
Deng Xiaoping's policy of “reform and opening-up,” the country's capital
and resources couldn't keep up with the population's demands.
Beijing's answer was to slow the population's growth. Over time, that
created a disproportionate amount of elderly people. “China’s
demographic transition, characterized by people getting old before
becoming rich, creates challenges and opportunities,” the
state-controlled newspaper China Daily said in 2024.
In the years after implementation, the one-child policy produced
unintended consequences:
—A desire for sons gave rise to the hiding, mistreatment and sometimes
outright killing of baby girls, especially in rural areas.
—Among better-off families in cities — where the policy was primarily
aimed — it also gave rise to millions of households in which an only
child became the focus of attention, creating a generation of what some
call “little emperors.”
—Coupled with recent loosening of the “hukou,” or household
registration, system that limits where Chinese people can live within
their country, many only children wound up living far from their
parents, promoting social ills like loneliness and alienation.
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A man carries a toddler along a street in Beijing, Monday, Jan. 19,
2026. (AP Photo/Andy Wong)
 —Population growth slowed to a
crawl, leading in recent years to numbers like Monday's.
"China’s one-child policy will be remembered as one of the costliest
lessons of misguided public policymaking," the Brookings Institution
said in a 2016 report shortly after the policy was abolished. It
also blamed “a social discourse that has erroneously blamed
population growth for virtually all the country's social and
economic problems.”
Trying to turn the tide
One of China’s most ancient precepts is that there are three ways to
disrespect your parents and ancestors — and not having offspring is
one of them. In that respect, limiting population growth ran counter
to long-established cultural norms and traditions.
As the one-child policy ebbed, Chinese President Xi Jinping
rejuvenated that age-old notion. He started to publicly liken the
population to Chinese power once again — or, as he put it, a “great
wall of steel forged by over 1.4 billion Chinese people.”
It doesn’t help that India surpassed China in population in 2023.
The on-again, off-again rival and neighbor of China has vied of late
to be the leader of the Global South, a mantle China is pursuing as
well as an alternative to what it considers Western “hegemony.”
That’s a factor that makes China’s population both an internal and
an international issue.
So the country has taken some measures to, for lack of a better
term, reduce the friction. Condoms are taxed no more. Neither are
day care centers. Even matchmakers, a cornerstone of traditional
Chinese culture, also now find themselves doing their work tax-free.
More systemically, plans for the nation's next five-year plan for
development, beginning this year, include an aim to “encourage
positive views on marriage and childbearing” in addition to doubling
down on incentives for increasing birth rates and reducing the costs
of having and raising children. The official Xinhua News Agency last
month said that the initiatives, taken together, represent “a plan
to make childbirth essentially free.”
In the end, the question is whether the China of tradition endures,
or whether the realities of decades of Chinese policy and modern
global life continue to overwrite it. Can both co-exist? When you're
talking about 1.4 billion people, it's hard to say.
Mao might offer some guidance here. When the Great Helmsman made
that comment in 1957, it emerged in a work whose title succinctly
summed up the complex problem China faces — both then and now. Its
name: “On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People.”
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