Comparisons abound between China and India on their success in stabilising populations and achieving a better quality of life for citizens. The latest data from Beijing, showing record low births of 7.92 million and sharply higher deaths at 11.31 million in 2025 over the previous year, highlight how the two countries are diverging. In 2024, the world’s manufacturing powerhouse recorded 9.54 million births and 10.93 million deaths, underscoring the trend.
Even in terms of population-level rates, the pattern holds. Deaths at 8.04 per 1,000 people are the highest since 1968, while births are comparable to those recorded in 1738. If the projections of the UN World Population Prospects 2022 hold good, India, now the world’s most populous nation, will continue to witness population growth through the rest of the century to touch 1.5 billion, while China’s population is expected to maintain a decline, dropping to under 800 million.
Fertility, policy and economic impact
Both countries have achieved a fall in fertility rates — the number of births per woman — with a more pronounced impact on China since the 1980s under the strictly enforced one-child policy, which was ultimately given up in 2015. Population trends in the two countries have enormous significance for their respective economies and for the world at large, influencing consumption, labour demographics, pensions and future birth rates.
Even without the compulsion of electoral cycles, governments with poor control of costs find it difficult to persuade young people to have more children. This is China’s predicament today, where provisioning for an additional child is a daunting prospect for parents.
Youth prospects and social investment
What is worse for governments facing falling birth rates is making economic prospects perilous for youth as they prepare to enter a technology-dominated labour sector. Taking the long view of China’s growth as a global engine, it is worth emphasising that true development calls for investments in core social sectors such as education and health. These help populations build capabilities and better leverage emerging opportunities.
There is considerable literature to show that China, with its ‘barefoot doctors’, achieved a faster increase in life expectancy even before economic reforms — 68 years versus India’s 54 years in 1979 — although that momentum relative to India slowed after the Chinese health system came under greater market influence. India’s health sector, meanwhile, is heavily commercialised.
India’s unfinished agenda
What is also important for India to note is that while it has achieved a sharp decline in fertility rates, it has not seen a comparable decline in infant mortality, even accounting for reductions largely concentrated in the southern states. As many scholars point out, India’s democratic credentials should help it advance the capabilities of its citizens and spur economic growth — something the Chinese system cannot easily replicate.
Yet, market fundamentalist policies have largely failed to grasp the fundamentals of universal education and health, threatening to keep India trapped in a middling development trajectory.
