Chinese Marriage Data Confirms Demographic Crisis || July 20, 2026
Most of the data coming out of China isn't worth the paper it's printed on, but there are a handful of metrics that aren't based on estimates. Today, we'll be looking at marriage registrations and what the 6% decline from last year means.
This echoes a decades-long decline in marriage registrations and reflects the broader demographic decline facing China. Since an overwhelming number of Chinese births occur within marriage, the population decline may be even worse than previously forecasted.
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Comments (40)
It’s all due to mobile phone addiction. I have 4 nephews in a western countries. Despite stable jobs, no stable girlfriends. Dinner involves watching them randomly pick up mobile phones if the conversation hits a quiet spot.
Is the young adult unemployment level part of this equation as well? True there are less people, but if you don’t have a job or a prospect of getting one the incentive to marry and have a family is much lower.
Peter continues to be the ONLY one talking about this.
This is why I wonder what Chinas future plans are. There is always talk about China invading Taiwan. Like PZ has discussed related to Russia, it seems as though the window of opportunity for China to make big global moves is closing. Is it safe to assume that if we can keep China contained for another decade or two that they will eventually no longer pose any sort of viable threat to the global order? Although it seems the US is actively undermining itss global status these days. So we may not be much of an influence either in five more years.
I guess mass attack waves won’t be a thing anymore
Oh good god, Elon wants to go to Mars, can we solve PZ’s microphone issues first.
Do you think China will be able to compensate the lack of man power with robots? They seem to be having lots of success in that matter.
He’s said on other videos that he doesn’t think anything like that would work. I think his words were “even Star Wars cloning wouldn’t work.” Robots can produce but they can’t consume and China is having a consumption problem
The population is hollowing out, with far fewer young people. And as of a few years ago, at least, the employment rate for young workers in China is high. Meaning while the supply is low, the demand is even lower. What causes the very low demand for young workers? Automation, Economic collapse?
Is there a subscription tier that includes clean audio?
https://www.kompas.id/artikel/china-starts-turning-off-girlfriend-ai Related? Very likely. Too late? Very definitely.
There is no "Shanghai Academy of Sciences" though, there is "Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences" and a "Shanghai Academy of Science and Technology"
Gonna be a little long winded here. I have often heard Mr. Zeihan talk about the demographic collapse and the "hollowing out" of China's population. I have never seen it. I don't go to China on a weekly basis. I don't live there. However, I do watch Youtube. There are several travel vloggers I watch and learn about other countries. One of the ones I watch is a couple named Matt & Julia. He is British, she is Russian. They are married, travel around and make comments. A few weeks ago I saw one of them in the middle of China, or at least away from the coast and inside China a bit. They were in a small town/city. It was amazing. The streets were practically empty. They found some old homes(?) that Julia recognized as Soviet era style from when the Soviets came in and helped build a railroad in the region. They were ALL unoccupied. They went into a restaurant to have a bite of lunch. Someone had to run and get the owner to come make food. These two were the only customers. After eating and walking around a bit Julia commented that they had not seen anyone under the age of 30 in the entire town. This is an anecdotal story of one couple of vloggers doing their thing. But if their observation of internal China is even remotely reflective of the greater issue of Chinese population collapse, Chairman Xi will be the man at the top of the heap when the heap falls down.
There is great suspicion of China's actual population. How hard did Covid hit the very susceptible people with no viable vaccine? After the lockdown was lifted, crematoriums in China were doubled and were running 24/7 for close to a year. China could be down by a half a billion or more from their rosy estimate of 1.4 billion.
The focus on shaping demographic data — isn't just a problem in China. Look no further than here in the USA after the last election! China's centralized system, for all its faults, has at least aligned its manufacturing base with a coherent military strategy. By contrast, U.S. policy — particularly at the state level — is actively undermining domestic manufacturing and defense capacity. See last week's defense contract news where Texas won a tech manufacturing defense contract over a far superior site plus workforce here in California. But State Senator Cabaldon undermined it, and Governor Newsom assigned low-level staff to help secure it. A pretty piss-poor showing of helping the people they're elected to serve. They already sold their souls to the Sierra Club(s) of the world! Also, China's demographic decline may matter less than we think: automation could let it maintain manufacturing dominance even as its population shrinks. They're already so far ahead we can't even see the dust! Lastly, here in CA, the power we’ve given to State staff will likely lead to a failed state. For example, the Water Board's policies are bankrupting agriculture… a good long-term policy for our food supply? Wait, we don’t think strategically with regard to our food supply. Also, the Air Board's rules are pushing manufacturers out of state. Further, the Public Employee Review Board is focused on protecting the lowest-level employees and stripping an agency's ability to manage its workforce. I’ll stop my rant ... as I could go on!
Dude presumably has multimillionaire followers and thousands of people tuning into his videos every day. Can someone get this man a microphone that doesn't suck
Beating a dead horse here, but the elites of the world (at least in the west) that are close to silicon valley have been aware of this since 2022. Look up the Shanghai Police database hack: it revealed the family lineage in ALL the records from grandparent to parent to child, and showed that birth rates since the year 2000 have been 70% lower than what was actually reported. 70%. If you do the math on that, it's about 300-350 million people under age 26 that DO NOT EXIST. THIS is the reason for the trillions of investment into warehousing gpus and building out data centers...people in the know understand very clearly that the global supply chain is going to be falling apart very, very soon.
If China's population is much closer to 1 Billion, it beggars the question of why Xi and his predecessor have allowed the over development of apartments around the country that are well in excess of 1.4 Billion people, let alone 1 Billion?
Peter. Either get a better microphone or stop walking around when filming. Half of your videos have such bad clipping from the wind that it’s hard to make out what you’re saying. Invest in a good quality wind microphone please
Please work on sound quality
Well, gee-whiz does this mean that all the China cheerleaders are gonna give up on believing that China is gonna be the next United States of America economic powerhouse to replace the United States? Sounds like it might be in trouble. You know back in days gone by when the situation happened you just rated the folks next-door still their women and kids and killed all the men. Is that coming soon? Sounds like it.
Did you consider the relative boost in marriage certificates for the year of the dragon(2024)? Big deal in china to have a dragon baby.
You passed more security cameras in the old city than a modern prison!
In the US, the marriage rate went down from 7.0 per 1,000 population in 2016 to 6.1 per 1,000 in 2023 even though the marriage-age population stayed roughly flat to slightly up. Is it possible that to some degree Chinese people are just getting married less?
Seems like with China's internal capacity to spy on its citizens they could make estimates based upon cell phone and computer accounts. that might well exclude the poorest rural seniors but that could be considered.
Great point.
Look, you consistently rail on about demographics worldwide, and today it's China again. Answer this: hasn't technology-robotics, LLMs, and automation to name a few more than made up "demographic loss?" And in fact a fewer people world be a huge gain for the environment and overall quality of life. Indeed, China seems to be doing just fine economically, socially, and educationally.
AI helps with some things, but it doesn't replace a population of consumers in their 30s and 40s at peak spend. That's needed for a healthy economy. And just look at the size of the construction companies going insolvent in China (and their banks exposed to that debt) to see how much trouble their economy is in.
Tomorrow, panic in Beijing, as they realize yet *another* data point the bureaucrats have to burry. (Or be buried, themselves!)
Given the fact that they invested massively in robotics and in the last few years in AI, how much can that offset the demographic decline impact? Their economy is about 30% less dependent on consumption than USA. Any takes on that?
AI & robots don't consume products. They can make as much as they want, but if they don't have a population to buy said products, the economy suffers.
Young Chinese men can no longer afford the bride price, 20-80k usd.
Unless they import them from Russia.
How do they not know since they control all internet on phones and WeChat? They all have social credit scores…so just add them up, no?
Amen
Seems like marriage and kids is on the decline in a lot of places.
That is true. It is the consequence of a high degree of prosperity and freedom.
Is China going to be lucky here? Isn’t AI going to leave countries with stable (nevermind increasing) populations with large numbers of unemployed/unemployable citizens?
The only flaw in that point is *nobody’s* population is “stable”, at this point. The demographic colapse is world wide. Even the areas with *above* replacement rate fertility, are still decreasing in said fertility. The “problem” is everywhere, right now. The consequences, however, are immediate, for China, and a hundred years down the road, for central Africa. The US probably won’t hit the wall for another forty years. But that wall is there, and we *will* hit it, if we ignore the problem.
I know it’s more complicated than this but it does feel like if our foreign policy was defined by a broken Magic 8 Ball, rather than a human, we’d do just fine. We just need it to tell TroTUS “Ask again later” for the next 20 years.