Yi Fuxian draws parallels between the Roman empire's missteps and the Chinese government's efforts to avoid a similar fate

On July 28, China announced a new monthly childcare subsidy of CN¥300 ($42) for each child under the age of three. Aimed at boosting the country’s fertility rate, this policy marks a dramatic shift – just a few years ago, families were fined 3-10 times the per capita annual income for unauthorised births.

China’s current demographic challenges and policy responses bear striking similarities to those of ancient Rome, where sustaining the population required each woman who lived to menopause to bear between five and seven children. Yet even with this shortfall, the Romans actively practiced eugenics. As Seneca, adviser to Emperor Nero, declared: “Children, too, if they are born weak or deformed, we drown.”

Female infants faced a significantly higher risk of infanticide. Just 1% of the 600 families recorded in second-century Delphic inscriptions raised two daughters. This led to severely skewed sex ratios: 131 males for every 100 females in Rome, and up to 140 males per 100 females in Italy and North Africa. The resulting shortage of women fueled population decline. Social attitudes compounded the problem: many men were unwilling to marry, despite the pleas of figures like the Roman statesman Metellus Macedonicus, who insisted it was their civic duty to have children.

China, too, embarked on a population-control experiment, implementing a one-child policy (under the eugenics-tinged slogan “fewer but better births”) from 1980 to 2015. Official data show that 369 million abortions were performed between 1980 and 2020 – some of them forcibly. In 2020 alone, 43% of all pregnancies ended in abortion.

Like ancient Rome, China disproportionately targeted female fetuses. The 2010 census registered 119 boys for every 100 girls aged 0-9 nationwide. In places like Jishui County in Jiangxi Province, the ratio was as high as 163 boys per 100 girls. This gender disparity has had long-term demographic consequences: first marriages had declined by 61% between 2013 and 2024. And the trend is expected to persist, as the number of women aged 20-34 – the age group responsible for 85% of Chinese births – is projected to fall by half by 2050.

To combat declining births, Rome’s first emperor, Augustus, introduced pronatalist reforms. These included the Lex Julia in 18 BCE and the Lex Papia Poppaea in 9 CE, both of which aimed to encourage marriage and childbearing by offering rewards to parents and penalising unmarried or childless citizens – specifically, men over 25 and women over 20. Ironically, both of the consuls who drafted the Lex Papia Poppaea were themselves unmarried.

Rome’s elite, reliant on slave labour rather than familial support, had little incentive to raise children. Even Augustus, when reminded of his disgraced only biological child, Julia, is said to have sighed and exclaimed, “Would that I had never married, and that I had died without offspring.”

By contrast, imperial China – adhering to Confucian values – fostered a robust family-based support system, rewarding child-rearing and punishing unfilial behavior as severely as treason. In modern China, state-run social security has gradually replaced the family’s traditional economic functions, reducing incentives for childbearing. As one young man in Shanghai put it, “We are the last generation.”

Rome’s slave-driven economy achieved urbanisation levels of 25-30%, comparable to China in the 1990s, when fertility rates rapidly declined. Archaeological findings show that population densities in Pompeii and Ostia reached 17,000 and 32,000 people per square kilometer, respectively, far exceeding modern cities like Chicago and London, which average 4,000-5,500 people per square kilometer.

This urban crowding strained ancient Rome’s infrastructure and drove up housing costs, triggering a profound shift in social values and lifestyles. For the upper and middle classes, raising children had become too burdensome. “Children were now luxuries which only the poor could afford,” observed the American historian Will Durant.

While more than two-thirds of China’s population lives in urban areas, the built-up portion of its cities accounts for only 0.65% of the country’s total land, owing to tight restrictions on urban expansion. The result is exceptionally high urban population densities that rival ancient Rome and surpass Japan. Population density tends to suppress fertility, so it is not surprising that China’s fertility rate has fallen below Japan’s.

By 100 CE, low fertility had spread beyond Rome’s elite, prompting Emperor Trajan to launch the Alimenta program, which offered food subsidies, financial aid, and education for children. But even these incentives failed to reverse the trend. The historian Tacitus later noted that “marriages and the rearing of children did not become more frequent, so powerful were the attractions of a childless state.”

After decades under the one-child policy, China has also become something of a “childless state.” By 2023, the national fertility rate had fallen to 1.0 births per woman, with nearly half of Shanghai’s districts dropping to 0.4.

Facing financial strain, foreign invasions, and mounting administrative challenges, the Roman Empire split into two parts in 395 CE. The Western Empire, plagued by a severe demographic crisis, came to rely heavily on barbarian immigrants to sustain its economy and military. But its failure to integrate these newcomers ultimately led to its collapse in 476 CE, ushering in Europe’s millennium-long Middle Ages. The eastern Byzantine Empire, bolstered by higher fertility rates and greater wealth, endured for another thousand years.

The Roman Empire did more to combat its demographic decline than Chinese authorities today appear willing to do, yet it still failed to save itself. China also faces challenges Rome never had to contend with, such as widespread contraception, rising childbearing age, and resources directed toward pensions and elder care instead of supporting families and child-rearing.

As countries around the world confront demographic crises, it seems that all roads really do lead to Rome. The United States’ fertility rate, for example, fell from 2.1 in 2007 to below 1.6 in 2024, compared with 1.38 in the European Union and 1.26 in Canada.

China’s situation, however, is particularly perilous. Unless it is reversed, a demographic decline of this magnitude could recall the collapse of the Roman Empire.

*Yi Fuxian, a senior scientist in obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is the author of Big Country with an Empty Nest, which went from being banned in China to ranking first in China Publishing Today’s 100 Best Books of 2013 in China. Copyright 2025 Project Syndicate, here with permission.