U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer is heading to China, aiming to improve relations with Beijing amid tensions with the United States.

BEIJING (AP) — China’s one-child policy, one of the harshest attempts at population control the world has seen, forced abortions on women, made sterilization widespread and led to baby daughters being sold or even killed, because parents wanted their only child to be a male.

Measured another way, the birth rate in 2025 — 5.63 per 1,000 people — is the lowest on record since 1949, the year that Mao Zedong’s Communists overthrew the Nationalists and began running China. Figures before that, under the previous Nationalist government, were not available.