A nurse cares for a newborn baby at the Women and Children’s Hospital in Fuyang, Anhui Province, China, on Aug. 8, 2022. CFOTO/Future Publishing via Getty Images
The Chinese regime is censoring online speech against having children as it continues to grapple with population decline.
On Feb. 12, the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) announced its annual Chinese New Year censoring campaign to “create a festive, peaceful, and positive online atmosphere” for the holiday. It said speech promoting not getting married or not having children would be a target for the month-long clampdown.
The CAC first targeted such speech in its Chinese New Year censorship campaigns in 2025. The measure, along with other efforts, has apparently failed to reverse the country’s population decline.
The 2026 announcement was made just ahead of the nine-day Chinese New Year holiday that began on Feb. 15. During this time, younger generations traditionally visit their parents and extended families and get grilled on topics such as their romantic relationships and family plans—topics also popular among content creators trying to garner views.
The CAC said it will censor comments that “maliciously incite negative emotions,” including those “promoting and advocating unhealthy values such as not getting married or having children, opposing marriage and childbirth, inciting gender antagonism, or stirring up ‘fear of marriage’ or ‘anxiety about childbirth.’”
The CAC will also clamp down on topics such as artificial intelligence-generated “digital garbage,” arguments among regions or fandoms, so-called conspiracy theories, and information about gambling, sexual, or divination services, the administration said.
The censoring of speech against having children is one of a series of measures that the Chinese regime has used to battle a demographic crisis.
In 2015, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) abandoned its decade-long one-child policy, which the regime claimed had prevented 400 million births.
Besides initiatives rolled out by regional officials, Beijing launched free preschool education programs in 2025, after introducing nationwide subsidies that offer roughly $500 per child younger than 3 each year.
In December 2025, it scrapped the tax exemption for condoms and oral contraceptives, gave an exemption to matchmaking agencies, and introduced new tax breaks for child care services and marriage-related businesses.
According to figures published by the National Bureau of Statistics, in 2025, China recorded 7.92 million births, or 5.63 births per 1,000 people. This is the lowest rate since official recordkeeping began in 1949, when the CCP seized control of the mainland.
The number of births in 2025 was less than half the number of births in 2016, when about 18 million babies were born.
National Bureau of Statistics figures in 2025 also showed that the size of the Chinese population had shrunk for four consecutive years, to 1,404.89 million in 2025.
The reliability of China’s official statistics has long raised questions, as the CCP has a record of concealing information deemed harmful to its image, especially data related to the COVID-19 pandemic. It remains unclear how many Chinese people died during the COVID-19 pandemic and how it affected China’s demographics.
Dorothy Li contributed to this report.
