China has a big numbers problem: Its population is shrinking amid a collapsing birth rate. This demographic crisis poses a significant threat to Beijing’s pursuit of international economic and political dominance.

First reported by the Financial Times, the population decline is expected to be confirmed in China’s 10-year census later this year. It would represent the first such decline since the Great Famine that Mao Zedong’s Communist Party caused in the early 1960s with its “Great Leap Forward” economic program.