Counting Babies in China (and Elsewhere)

In 2014, Chinese filmmaker Zhang Yimou and his wife paid a fine of $1.2 million for having a third child, which was against the law.

By Gwynne Dyer, in Opinion · 01 Aug 2025, 12:01 · 0 Comments

Credits: Unsplash; Author: @monroefiles;

They didn’t go to jail – it was treated more like a very big parking ticket – but it was assessed according to the parents’ income and it was meant to hurt. Over the years, the Chinese regime has collected about $2 trillion in baby fines.

Zhang just had bad timing. Had he waited one more year, he would have kept that money, because having a third child was suddenly declared legal in 2015. Indeed, under the new pro-natal rules announced last month, he and his wife now would be entitled to $500 a year for each child under three (but he’s not getting his money back).

The Chinese regime has been obsessed with its population for half a century – and getting it wrong at almost every turn. The original ‘One Child Policy’ was imposed in 1979, only three years after Mao Zedong’s death. Under the Great Helmsman, a huge population was a good thing, but subsequent planners thought it would hold China back.

So they created new laws that were arbitrary, ill-considered and futile. The One Child Policy was strictly enforced in the cities, although rural families were sometimes allowed a second child if the first was a girl. However, it was introduced just as urbanisation and education for girls were starting to push China’s birth rate down anyway.

Between 1970 and 1978, just before the policy was inflicted on 600 million Chinese, the fertility rate plummeted from an average of 5.8 children per woman to only 2.7. It has continued to drop more slowly, passing through 1.7 in 2015 and bottoming out at 1.0 in 2023.

So now there is panic in Beijing. Will we have enough workers to keep the economy growing in the next generation? Will we have enough soldiers? Will there even be enough young Chinese to look after us all when we get old, for the old will outnumber the young? The answer to all these questions is no. Probably not.

The latest estimate is that China’s population, now 1.4 billion, will be back down to 600 million by 2100. A much larger share of that population than usual will be past working age, as is always the case when populations fall for non-catastrophic reasons. And the pro-birth measures that the government is now rolling out will have little effect; they rarely do.

It’s not just China; it’s the new normal. South Korea never had a one-child policy, but it shows an almost identical trend line, dropping from a fertility rate of 6.1 children per female in 1960 to 2.8 babies per woman in 1980 and only 0.75 children per woman in 2023.

Japan, Brazil, India; they all show the same story of falling fertility on the graphs, with only minor distinctions between them. Bring your population into the cities and the cash economy, educate your young women, and regardless of the local culture, religion or ideology, those young women will decide for themselves how many babies they want. (Hint: it isn’t six.)

Dramatic incentives liked those proposed in South Korea – big loans (up to $73,000) for newly-wed couples, with debt forgiveness based on the number of children born; child allowances up to age 18; lower taxes for families with more children – may help a bit, but they won’t boost the fertility rate back above the replacement level (2.1 children per woman).

Even China’s harsh One-Child Policy, with its forced abortions, sterilisations and cash penalties, achieved little. The regime still claims it spared the country another 400 million mouths to feed, but leading academics estimate it avoided 100 million births at most over three decades.

The real takeaway is that declining populations almost everywhere except in Africa and bits of the Middle East should not be seen only as a problem. They bring with them problems like a higher dependency ratio (more elderly people depending on a shrinking workforce), but managing this kind of ‘problem’ is what governments are there for.

The larger difficulty, I suspect, is ideological and even psychological. Almost every human being has been steeped in the notion that growth is always good. I am not anti-growth in principle, but like most people, I grew up in a country that is now much more populous than it was when I was a child. Yet it never felt empty, and it was not boring.

We got from two billion to eight billion in the past eighty years, but the old place is still essentially the same. If we are now heading back down to three or four billion in the next century (as we probably are), we shouldn’t feel particularly threatened.