An elderly man carries a baby alongside a woman holding a dog on a street in Shanghai on Jan. 9, 2026. | Jade Gao / AFP via Getty Images
China’s calculus for a possible invasion of Taiwan and the island’s ability to repel it has a new variable — a fertility crisis thinning the ranks of military-age personnel in both countries.
Beijing and Taipei’s ability to navigate demographic challenges spawned by now-defunct population control measures may affect the outcome of potential Chinese aggression against the self-governing island that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said may occur as early as next year.
China recorded 7.92 million births last year, a decline from 9.54 million in 2024. A contraction in its birth rate to 5.63 from 6.77 per 1,000 people in the same period made it the country’s “lowest level in modern history,” state media reported.
Taiwan’s birth rate has steadily dropped month-on-month over the past two years, hitting 4.62 per 1,000 births last year per government data. That puts Taiwan on track to supplant South Korea’s position as the country with the world’s lowest birth rate — a guarantee of lower numbers of future conscripts. Its defense ministry blames the falling birth rate for a reduction in Taiwan’s active-duty military personnel — the number slid to 152,885 in 2024, down from 164,884 one year earlier.
That raises questions about how effectively Taiwan will be able to deploy its billions of dollars in U.S. weaponry aimed to fend off potential Chinese aggression.
“Fewer young people will create complications for sustaining Taiwan’s force of the future,” Lauren Dickey, former acting director for Taiwan at the Pentagon, told Forecast. A shrinking recruitment base makes military service “a harder political sell to a finite pool of youth” and should prompt measures including extending military conscription to Taiwanese women, Dickey added.
A carrot-and-stick approach toward both conscripts and potential volunteers may ease those strains.
Short-term fixes should include “legal changes and more attractive incentives” for military service including lengthening the current one-year conscription period for Taiwanese males and raising the pay for both conscripts and volunteers, said Andrew Nien-dzu Yang, who served as Taiwan’s defense minister in 2013.
Taiwan’s diplomatic outpost in the U.S. didn’t respond to a request for comment.
In terms of tactical planning, Beijing’s plunging birth rate doesn’t pose an immediate threat to a military whose two million personnel under arms makes it the world’s largest. But it’s producing a demographic mismatch as the rise in the number of China’s elderly steadily outpaces the size of the working-age population. That will put pressure on the Chinese government to balance its military spending — and its determination to control Taiwan — with the ballooning costs of social services for its retirees.
“China’s demographic shift is more of a strategic challenge for the country than an operational problem for the People’s Liberation Army,” said Drew Thompson, former director for China, Taiwan and Mongolia in the Office of the Secretary of Defense in the Obama and first Trump administrations.
“An aging population will want the government to spend more on butter, rather than guns,” added Thompson, who is now a fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore.
The Chinese embassy declined to comment on how the country’s falling birth rate might affect its military.
The deployment of artificial intelligence-backed autonomous weapons systems — air and sea drones and land-based robotic systems — could help reduce the dependence of both militaries on traditional manned systems. China’s deployment of a gun-toting “robot dog” in a joint Chinese-Cambodian military exercise in 2024 underscores how “population will matter less for Chinese and perhaps American militaries in the future,” said retired Senior Colonel Zhou Bo, a Chinese military expert and a senior fellow at Tsinghua University’s Center for International Security.
Such advanced tech solutions may just shift the need for human military personnel from front-line positions to supportive roles.
“Many types of newer weapons require fewer but more skilled people to man and operate than old weapons, but often increase technical and maintenance support,” said Ret. Lt. Col. Dennis Blasko, a PLA expert and former military intelligence officer.
Meanwhile both Taipei and Beijing are rolling out mostly ineffective social-engineering initiatives aimed to spur a longer-term surge in population growth. In Taiwan they include cash bonuses for families that have children, while China has rolled out perks for births programs ranging from tax breaks to paid marriage leave.
“The effect has been zilch,” said Carl Minzner, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and an expert on Chinese demographic trends. Social factors affecting birth rates resist “any of the measures that Beijing or its neighbors have attempted to encourage a supportive environment for people to have children.”
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Cabinets holding racks and active servers are seen at the Digital Realty Innovation Lab data center in Ashburn, Virginia on November 12, 2025. | Andrew Caballero-Reynolds / AFP via Getty Images
The artificial intelligence boom sweeping the world is powered by thousands of data centers across the globe. These massive computing units, which turbocharge advanced AI systems, are cropping up at swift speed.
Five years ago, the general public hardly knew what data centers did, said Urvi Parekh, Meta’s director of global energy. Now, they’re on everyone’s minds.
Forecast spoke with Parekh, who helps secure energy to power Meta’s portfolio of data centers. “We need many different sources of electricity generation. If we don’t hit the accelerator,” she said, “the worry is that we could end up feeling constrained.”
Data centers have become a flash point in the political debate over AI and soaring energy costs. How has that changed the tech industry’s approach to data center expansion and the work you do?
Five years ago, no one really talked about data centers. It wasn’t understood what a data center does and how it underpins a lot of the technologies you’re used to accessing on your laptop or on your phone. So there’s been this burgeoning awareness — these software products that all of us rely on every day, how do you have physical infrastructure that supports that?
At the same time, we’re still in this process of educating folks of what happens inside a data center, how much investment is going into the community whenever we’re building a data center, the infrastructure around a data center that actually results in hundreds of millions of dollars of investment by a company that’s coming there.
What keeps you up at night? What’s the biggest issue on your mind?
There’s one that I’ve been thinking about a lot recently, and it relates to Meta’s big nuclear announcement that happened two weeks ago, when we made a large commitment to really focus on accelerating advanced nuclear technology.
Right now, in order to be able to grow the electricity grids to meet the demand of AI, we need many different sources of electricity generation. If we don’t hit the accelerator on ensuring that many types of electricity can be built to generate the electrons that are needed for data centers, the worry is that we could end up feeling constrained on how many data centers we could build.
Are you worried that we won’t ever have enough data centers to meet growing demand?
Right now, what I end up focusing a lot on: How does the U.S. rebuild and really accelerate the muscle to add power plants to our grids quickly? There have been periods of time in the U.S. where we have rapidly expanded the amount of power plants that are available, and this is one of those moments. When we start to add power plants and just continue to have that muscle, we’ll be able to grow those supply chains domestically … But there is this startup phase that we’re in right now.
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