They are desperate, Jesus 0.9 births per woman!!

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New marriages in China reportedly plummeted by one-fifth last year, implying that the official number of births will likely fall from 9.54 million in 2024 to 7.3- 7.8 million in 2025.

Thus, while China represents 17.2% of the global population, it will account for less than 6% of births — comparable to Nigeria, which just 25yrs ago had only 8% of the Chinese population.

Moreover, China’s fertility rate in 2025 is expected to fall to 0.9 births per woman (2.1 is the standard replacement level), just half of what officials predicted in 2016. So alarming is this demographic reality that early this month Chinese Premier Li Qiang announced that the government will be rolling out new policies to boost the birth rate.

But the marriage crisis will greatly undermine these efforts. Marriages already plummeted from 13.47 million couples in 2013 to 6.11 million in 2024 — albeit with some deviation in 2020-24, owing to the "zero-COVID" policy. Likewise, the overall marriage rate fell from 9.9 per 1,000 people to 4.3 over the same period, compared to 5.4 in Taiwan and 6.1 in the United States (2023).

Why is this happening? Unfortunately for the Chinese leadership, there is no single cause. Salient factors include the steady decline in China’s childbearing-age population; changes in lifestyle such as gaming, tiktoking and the emergence of rat people; the lingering effects of the (now-discarded) one-child policy on attitudes toward marriage and childbearing; the persistent oversupply of men; and high youth unemployment reach 20% with men who have work having no interest in women due to burnout from high job requirements.