The world’s most populous country has begun to shrink: China’s National Bureau of Statistics reported a decline in its population of nearly one million people in 2o22. This is the first year where China's birth rate was at a net negative since the Great Leap Forward: an economic experiment that resulted in widespread famine in the 1960s. There are three factors which contribute to China’s declining populations: lasting consequences of the one-child policy, changing attitudes towards marriage and childbirth, and the expenses associated with raising children.

For the past three decades, the world has seen the People’s Republic of China (PRC) as a youthful economic juggernaut on a one-way trip to surpass the United States as the world’s predominant economic force. However, this January the PRC has reported that in 2022 the country’s economy had only grown by 3% , while its population had shrunk by approximately 850,000 people, marking China’s first population drop since the Great Famine of Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward.