Condoms also prevent disease and the making of babies with love interests you’re not interested in starting a family with, but never mind that now. The point is that the central planners in the People’s Republic of China want more babies (except from members of groups that it’s trying to stop from having more babies). So they’re gonna get more babies, even if they have to impose a hefty condom tax to do it (New York Post, December 13, 2025).
After a 30-year exemption, the country is slapping a 13% sales tax on condoms, birth control pills and devices, hoping to boost its declining birth rates and offset the long-term impact of an aging population and declining workforce.
And with contraception more expensive under the new law, which takes effect Jan. 1, 2026, officials are hoping other financial incentives help usher in a baby boom.
Changes include making childcare services, elder care institutions and disability service providers tax exempt; offering extended maternity leave, which varies across the country but has gone from 128 days to 158 days in big cities like Beijing, along with a proposed 30-day paid paternity leave.
On Jan. 1, 2025, each family became eligible to receive a cash allowance of 3,600 yuan, or about $500, per year for each child born after that date, Bloomberg reported.
China’s official population—the one that comes up in Internet searches—is about 1.4 billion. According to the Chinese government, population in the vicinity of this baseline has declined for three years in a row. A UN report projects that if the trend continues, the population could drop from what is assumed to be 1.4 billion now to 633 million by the turn of the next century. But reasonable questions have been raised about whether the 1.4 billion statistic is accurate. Various guesstimates put the real number somewhere between 300 million and 800 million.
Anyway, according to the Chinese Communist Party, which can’t ever leave anything alone, declining population is a problem that must be dealt with by country-wide family planning.
It could be worse. At least the state is not forcing ethnically preferred young people to have unprotected sex at gunpoint.
Also see:
StoptheCCP.org: China’s Fake Population Count
“It’s an open question whether today’s communists know that they are overestimating or by how much: their data is rotten at the source.”
