China's Demographic Crisis: From One-Child Policy to Forcing More Births

The Myanmar-based MeKong News reported that over the past four decades, the state, not women, has been dictating the country's birth policies.

While the one-child policy, introduced in 1979, was justified as an urgent brake on population growth, the country is now forcing women towards more children as it stares at a demographic collapse.

As per official data released in January, the number of births in 2025 fell 17 per cent year-on-year to 7.92 million -- the lowest recorded since population records began in 1949.

"Beijing still treats reproduction as a lever of economic planning, not as a matter of personal freedom," the report said.

With an aim "to accelerate development, lift incomes and ease pressure on resources", the one-child policy subjected scores of women to forced abortions, involuntary sterilisation, and intense pressure tactics, including detention, fines, and harassment.

The state coercion "became an enforcement mechanism embedded into local governance, where compliance was treated as administrative performance," the report said, adding that it resulted in not just demographic control, but also the institutionalisation of reproductive surveillance.

Furthermore, the traditional preference for sons also skewed the country's sex ratio.

"Under a one-child restriction, the stakes rose dramatically: the 'wrong' gender became, for some families, an economic and cultural catastrophe," the report said.

It highlighted that the human cost was borne by girls, whose births were often treated as mistakes in a system built to limit choice.

China ended the one-child policy and moved to a two-child policy in 2016 and later expanded to a three-child policy as the birth rate continued to slide.

"The confusion of China's policy shifts reveals a deeper problem: rather than recognising individual rights, the government recalibrated reproductive limits based on economic needs," the report said.

While the state has begun encouraging childbirth, many couples are facing mounting pressures due to rising living costs, job insecurity, housing burdens, and gendered workplace penalties.

Notably, with the skewed sex ratio, China now also has a shrinking pool of women of childbearing age.

"Even as the state now calls for more childbirth, women remain caught between policy demands and social realities," the report said.

It said that the consequences of decades of social engineering may now not be reversible, even with policy U-turns.

- IANS