Fewer Babies In China

China's Total Fertility Rate: 

The 20% drop in two years. Following a 40% drop in five years. There's nothing even remotely similar in the historical record.

From the Wall Street Journal as paraphrased at the site f.k.a. Twitter.

Do the math and women in China are having 52% fewer children per woman per lifetime (which isn't exactly what TFR means, but is conveys the basic conceptual idea)  than they were seven years ago, when China's TFR was at a little more than the replacement rate. This is a quite rapid demographic transition. It isn't clear to me if this is some kind of echo bust from the One Child Policy are not. 

India now has more people than China does.

As an August 15, 2023 story  from Reuters explains:

China's fertility rate is estimated to have dropped to a record low of 1.09 in 2022, the National Business Daily said on Tuesday, a figure likely to rattle authorities as they try to boost the country's declining number of new births.

The state-backed Daily said the figure from China's Population and Development Research Center put it as having the lowest fertility level among countries with a population of more than 100 million.

According to The Economist:

The scars left by China’s population-control policies are clear. Last year, its population started to fall for the first time since 1962; its working-age population has been declining for a decade. A shrinking workforce acts as a drag on growth, and a swelling number of elderly puts pressure on the welfare system.

Family-planning regulations like the one-child policy are widely blamed for depressing birth rates. But a less explored idea is that falling birth rates can ripple through the population causing the decline to be self-reinforcing. There has been little hard evidence to back this up, but a new paper about changes in China 50 years ago appears to offer some proof. Pauline Rossi of Ecole Polytechnique in Paris and Yun Xiao of the University of Gothenburg show in the Journal of the European Economic Association that birth-control policies have “spillover effects”, meaning that if some couples reduce their number of children, it may lead others to follow suit.

China is considering a variety of policies to encourage young adults to marry and have children. The same link, a May 15, 2023 report, notes that a year ago, these were the numbers:

1.2: China’s total fertility rate, or TFR—the number of children a woman is expected to have over her lifetime—is one of the lowest in the world. In the US and the UK, the TFR is 1.7 and 1.6 respectively. In India, whose population recently beat China’s, the TFR is 2.