China has long held the moniker of the most populous country in the world, but that is no longer the case. China’s population peaked in 2021 at 1.43bn people with a gradual decline thereafter, and stood at around 1.42bn in 2025. Now, the title of the world’s most populous nation with 1.46bn people has passed over to India, after overtaking China’s top spot in 2023. Alongside its low reproduction rate, China also has a relatively old population, with a median age across both sexes of 40.1 years. Back to the 1950s Dionysios Tsilioris, a research analyst at URSA Shipbrokers, has crunched the numbers to assess how big a nosedive China’s population will take in the coming years and decades. “The UN’s median projections indicate that China’s population may decline to 1.4bn by 2030, falling further to 1.34bn in 2040, and to 1.26bn by 2050. Further ahead, UN estimates put China’s population in 2075 at around 930bn and anticipate that China may end the century at around 630m by 2100,” Tsilioris says. For a fair comparison, this is comparable to China’s historical population in 1957 and 1958, which stood at 630m and 640m, respectively. But this doesn’t mean that the world population will shrink. Quite the opposite. The global population is projected to rise to 10.18bn by 2100, after peaking at around 10.29bn in 2084. This will be led by continued growth in Sub-Saharan Africa. However, Christopher Rex, head of innovation and research at Danish Ship Finance, points out that China’s import boom was not mainly a story about population size. It was a story about a one-off development model that combined urbanisation, infrastructure build-out, export manufacturing, and a very high investment share of GDP over a sustained period. “That mix created an unusually large pull on bulk materials and energy, at the same time as China-built ports, coastal industry clusters, and domestic distribution networks that made seaborne supply chains efficient at extreme scale,” Rex explains. He does agree that demographics matter because it weakens the forward path for that model. A shrinking and ageing population reduces household formation, dampens construction intensity, and shifts demand away from steel and cement-heavy capital formation towards services, health, and consumption. China is the world’s largest dry bulk importing nation, accounting for around 40% of global dry bulk commodity discharges in 2025, according to vessel movement data from AXSMarine, versus 37% on average over the decade 2015–2024. Killing the competition But, according to Rex, demographics do not imply that China is losing its manufacturing role. China is increasingly shifting toward capital-intensive, AI-enabled and robotics-driven manufacturing systems that structurally decouple industrial output from labour supply. “This supports continued manufacturing dominance despite adverse demographics, but it does not recreate the raw material intensity of the earlier development phase. Advanced manufacturing sustains China’s position in global trade, but it does not generate the same step-change demand for iron ore, coal, and construction-related bulks that defined the past two decades,” he says. As Rex puts it, China is moving out of the phase where economic growth translated almost automatically into higher physical build-out. Much of the housing stock, transport infrastructure, port capacity, and industrial base required for a modern continental economy is already in place. “As that capital stoc