About 1.41 billion people, and fewer every year

China is home to about 1.409 billion people on the UN’s estimate, roughly one person in six on Earth, and the number is falling². China’s statistics bureau counted about 1.405 billion at the end of 2025, 3.39 million fewer than a year earlier and the fourth fall in a row⁵⁶⁷⁸.

Deaths now outnumber births: China recorded 7.92 million births in 2025 and 11.31 million deaths⁵. The figures cover mainland China only, without Hong Kong, Macao or Taiwan. The bureau’s count, confirmed by a large sample survey that found 1.405 billion in November 2025, runs about 0.7% below the UN’s⁵¹⁰².

Back to its 2000 population by 2050, with India far ahead

The UN’s medium projection has China falling to about 1.27 billion people by 2050, which takes it back to about the population it had in 2000². India passed China as the world’s most populous country in 2022 on the UN’s current estimates; the UN announced the crossover in April 2023, using its earlier figures²³⁵.

China had been the more populous of the two since the UN’s records begin in 1950, and its population peaked in 2021, at 1.43 billion on the UN’s count and 1,412.60 million on the statistics bureau’s²⁹. By 2100 the UN expects India to have about 1.51 billion people and China about 639 million². How the two compare now is on the page for India.

Even that projection may prove high. The UN assumed 8.7 million births in 2025, about 10% more than China recorded²⁵. If fertility stayed at its 2023 level instead of creeping up as the UN assumes, China would have about 1.24 billion people in 2050, and on the UN’s low variant 1.18 billion³.

Fewer women, fewer marriages, fewer babies

China’s birth rate is low because there are fewer women of childbearing age, fewer of them are marrying, and raising a child there is unusually expensive. Women now have about one child each on average, half the 2.1 a population needs to replace itself, on the UN’s estimate for 2025², down from 1.3 at the 2020 census¹¹.

The pool of potential mothers is shrinking. Women aged 20 to 39 fell from 214 million in 2010 to 179 million in 2025, the echo of decades of low fertility⁴.

Fewer couples marry. Registrations fell 20.5% in 2024 to about 6.1 million, before rebounding to 6.76 million in 2025¹⁶¹⁷.

And children cost a lot. A study by the YuWa Population Research Institute put the cost of raising a child to 18 at 6.3 times China’s income per person, second only to South Korea among the countries it compared¹⁸.

The government has tried to turn it round. The one-child limit gave way to two children in 2015 and three in 2021¹¹, and in July 2025 Beijing introduced a subsidy of 3,600 yuan a year for each child under three¹⁵. Births still fell in 2025⁵.

How much did the one-child policy matter?

The one-child policy, launched in 1980, is usually blamed for China’s low fertility, but demographers disagree about how much it did¹⁹. Fertility had already fallen from close to six children per woman around 1970 to under three by the end of that decade, under an earlier, also coercive campaign known as “later, longer, fewer”¹⁹.

Whyte, Wang and Cai credit most of the decline after 1980 to economic development, not enforcement, and note that from 1984 most rural families could have a second child if the first was a girl, so for much of the countryside it was never strictly a one-child policy¹⁹. Daniel Goodkind, a demographer, takes the other side. He estimates that China’s birth restrictions since 1971 averted a population of 360 to 520 million, and argues that “China’s very low fertility arrived two or three decades too soon” for a country at its income level²⁰.

One of the fastest-ageing countries on Earth

The median person in China is 40.6 years old in 2026, and people aged 65 and over made up 15.9% of the population at the end of 2025²⁵. By 2050, on the UN’s projection, the median age reaches 52 and nearly a third of the country, 30.9%, is 65 or older²⁴.

What stands out is the speed. The share of people aged 65 and over doubled from 7% to 14% in about two decades, from around 2001 to 2021¹³⁹. The same change took 69 years in the United States and 115 in France¹³. People also live longer: about 78 years on the UN’s estimate for 2025, and 79.25 by the National Health Commission’s count²¹².

In January 2025 China began raising its retirement age for the first time in more than 70 years, from 60 to 63 for men and from 50 or 55 to 55 or 58 for women, phased in over 15 years¹⁴. That matters because, as the population ages, fewer people of working age support more people in retirement.

Half the world’s coal, and half its wind and solar

China burns more coal than the rest of the world put together, 30% more in the International Energy Agency’s words²². The agency’s December 2025 estimate put China at 4,953 million tonnes out of a world total of 8,845 million, about 27% more than everyone else by our arithmetic²¹. China has 55% of the world’s coal power capacity, and in 2025 it built 78 gigawatts more, its biggest year for new coal plants in a decade²³²⁴.

It also has half the world’s wind and solar power, 1,843 of 3,683 gigawatts in 2025²³. Coal made 70% of China’s electricity in 2015 and 54.8% in 2025, and in the first half of 2026 it fell below half for the first time in a first half-year²³²⁵. Both are true at once: China is building out clean power faster than anyone and still adding coal plants, largely, by the analysts’ reading, as backup²⁵.

The coal has a human cost, and it is falling. Fine particle pollution dropped 40.8% between 2014 and 2023, adding about 1.8 years to average life expectancy, by the University of Chicago’s Air Quality Life Index²⁹. The environment ministry reported 2025 as the cleanest year on record, at 28 micrograms per cubic metre in its cities³⁰. That is still more than five times the WHO guideline, and in 2025 the world’s 25 most polluted cities were all in India, Pakistan and China²⁹³¹.

Air is not the only damage. As far back as 2013 the environment ministry acknowledged drinking-water crises in several places and “cancer villages” in some areas, its own term for places where industrial pollution had made illness common¹.

A quarter of humanity’s footprint, from 18% of its people

The average person in China now leaves about the same ecological footprint as the average Briton, 3.57 global hectares (hectares of land and sea at world-average productivity) against 3.65, and half that of an American at 7.14³². Multiplied by 1.4 billion people, that is a quarter of humanity’s footprint from 18% of its people³².

Put on a calendar, by our arithmetic, a world living like China would use up the planet’s resources for the year by around the start of June; the Global Footprint Network’s official 2026 date, 27 May, comes from its previous edition of the accounts³²³³. These accounts count Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan with the mainland. China uses four and a half times what its own land and seas renew, and has done so since the mid-1960s³².

Nearly three-quarters of the footprint, 71.6%, is carbon: the forest it would take to absorb China’s fossil carbon dioxide, of which coal burned for power and for industry such as steel and cement is the largest part³²²². Cropland, the farmland that feeds the country at home and abroad, makes up 11.7%³².

The footprint has tripled since 1979, from 1.15 to 3.57 global hectares per person³², over the same years that the share of Chinese people below the World Bank’s extreme-poverty line of $3.00 a day fell from 97% to zero on its survey series³⁴. Lifting hundreds of millions out of poverty came with a much larger demand on the planet.

China’s emissions have stopped rising, for now

China produced 32% of the world’s fossil carbon dioxide in 2024, and per person it now emits more than the European Union: 2.4 tonnes of carbon against 1.5, about 8.8 and 5.5 tonnes of carbon dioxide²⁸. But its emissions have been flat or falling since March 2024, according to analysis by Lauri Myllyvirta of the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air, and coal power fell in 2025 for the first time since 2015²⁶²².

Part of the reason is that China is building less: steel output fell 4% in 2025 and cement 7%, while solar output rose 43%²²²⁶. Estimates for 2025 range from a 0.3% fall to a 0.4% rise, so roughly flat²⁶²⁸. In the second quarter of 2026 emissions fell 1% as oil use dropped 9% during the Strait of Hormuz crisis, the first time, by Myllyvirta’s reading, that falling oil use has pulled China’s total down²⁷.

Whether this is the peak depends on the coal plants still being built and on how much China’s economy keeps leaning on heavy industry. How clean power is changing the world’s electricity is on the page about the share of renewable energy.

Back below a billion by 2070

On the UN’s medium path China falls back below a billion people during 2070, a level it first passed in 1981, and by 2100 it would have about 639 million, roughly as many as in 1958². Those are long projections from a starting point already running below the UN’s, so read them as a direction rather than a date.

The nearer test comes in early 2027, when the statistics bureau publishes births for 2026, the first full year of the childcare subsidy and of the 2025 rise in weddings. A lift there would be the first sign that policy can move the number; another fall would make the UN’s low variant look more likely.

A population about a tenth smaller by 2050 would, all else equal, trim China’s demand on the planet by roughly as much. Carbon is nearly three-quarters of that demand, though, so by our reading the bigger lever is how fast clean power replaces coal, and the flat emissions since 2024 suggest that has begun.