The UN has revised peak projections down several times; the peak is now expected at 10 billion.
Are you talking about something else ?
Rates are normally calculated by couples. 0.85 per person is a decline.
As to 2022, China did briefly drop to a TFR of 1.09, like GP said [1]; but the moving average over several years is more like 1.3. You have to put the 2022 drop in context that their very strict lockdown went into its third year, and there were two cases of pregnant women losing their babies e.g. because the hospital denied them entry for having negative Covid tests but a few hours too old [2].
[0]: https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/CHN/china/fertility-ra...
[1]: "China's fertility rate drops to record low 1.09 in 2022- state media" https://www.reuters.com/world/china/chinas-fertility-rate-dr...
[2]: https://fortune.com/2022/01/07/china-covid-cases-miscarriage...
Turns out the East Asian style of hyper-competitive child rearing has its downsides, namely the high costs dissuade parents from having children altogether.
China faces every antinatal problem the west does, except far worse.
1. Extremely high housing prices making family formation expensive
2. Small apartments suppress large family formation (Seen in Europe)
3. General collapse of marriage rates due to changing incentives and thus moral norms
4. Higher education decreasing fertile years.
5. Economic depression, especially for young people, euro debt crisis level of youth unemployment.
You add to that, that China still officially has a 3-child policy (not that many people even have 2), because the birth control bureaucrats still need a job.
China is probably 2nd lowest in the world behind South Korea, and will stay there, if not
Scott Galloway (and others, like Elizabeth Warren) have been saying this, about the US, repeatedly: US education costs rose (or at least, were allowed to rise by the politicians who were nominally regulating them) by 1400% since the 1970s [https://www.profgalloway.com/inflated/]. This was not sensible policy but if GDP growth via financialization of (third-level) education etc. is your economy's chosen indicator, it's what you get.
Anyway the low TFR is not necessarily a demographic crisis, it's up to the country whether it lets its population decrease (Japan, China), or uses immigration to sustain whatever its target population growth is (US, Canada, EU, SG, Aus).
> 2. Small apartments suppress large family formation (seen in Europe)
You're getting the direction of causality wrong: apartment size was a reaction to the decrease. Contraception, more years of education and other social changes were the drivers of smaller apartment sizes, not the effect.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_fer...
We know from experience that if those places actually started to improve, then the birth rate would drop precipitously.
For example, the US had a fertility rate of 7.0(!) in 1800 and saw no significant population growth due to births because most of those kids died well before reaching the age of reproduction.
Historically, fertility rates have always dropped once basic standards of living have managed to get rid of excess child mortality.
1. Easter island -- we, humans, deforested the island, that degraded and depleted human population significantly even before the first european ships discovered the island. From what I've heard, "Rapa Nui" movie is unusually historically correct on the events.
2. St. Matthew Island -- 29 introduced reindeer rapidly overpopulated the island and ate all the available food there, so the whole population died.
Same thing can happen on planet Earth.
More recent research shows that this is probably not true - there's evidence that the population was growing right up until the arrival of Europeans[1].
[1] https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/07/210713090153.h...
It is almost like humans are not mindless animals who solely reproduce because of biological urges or something.