The Chinese government this month announced it was stopping overseas adoptions of Chinese babies, ending a three-decade program and leaving hundreds of waiting American families in limbo.

Beijing has proposed new rules to make it easier for Chinese couples to register marriages — and harder to get divorced. There are plans to increase the retirement age, one of the world’s lowest at 60 for men and 50 or 55 for women. And the government has been offering incentives — tax breaks, time off, in vitro fertilization assistance and hard cash — for couples to have more children.

China’s rulers are trying everything possible to defuse a demographic time bomb. Their population is both shrinking and growing older. India passed China as the world’s most populous country last year. And China’s birth rate last year fell by about 5.7 percent to 6.39 births per 1,000 people. In 2022, the number of deaths topped births in China for the first time since Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward. By some estimates, the country’s population could more than halve by 2100.

China’s total fertility rate hovers around 1.0 — putting it roughly in the same baby-less camp as its near neighbors, South Korea and Japan. But unlike those........

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