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... bans emigration and encourages immigration?

https://archive.ph/0PL0u
From the NYT article.
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The world's most populous country has reached a pivotal moment: China's population has begun to shrink, after a steady, yearslong decline in its birthrate that experts say will be irreversible.

The government said on Tuesday that 9.56 million people were born in China last year, while 10.41 million people died. It was the first time deaths had outnumbered births in China since the Great Leap Forward, Mao Zedong's failed economic experiment that led to widespread famine and death in the 1960s.

Chinese officials have tried for years to slow down the arrival of this moment, loosening a one-child policy and offering incentives to encourage families to have children. None of those policies worked. Now, facing a population decline, coupled with a long-running rise in life expectancy, the country is being thrust into a demographic crisis that will have consequences not just for China and its economy but for the world.
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The last half of the article discusses the impact of COVID on China's population decline.

I suspect that won't happen for a long time, perhaps ever. The Chinese (and Japanese) are quite hostile to foreign immigrants (as a class) although they can be quite welcoming to people as individuals. But setting a policy to allow lots of immigration would be a cultural and political reversal of norms that have been in place for hundreds, perhaps thousands of years.

Most countries are facing a declining population. Parts of Africa are one of the few areas that will have increasing population. Maybe in the very long term a smaller population is better but the pain in getting there will be high. You have a ton of aging people needing help, medical facilities, etc. with fewer and fewer people around to provide that help. Definitely another reason why I think we have peaked, for now, in terms of quality of life and longevity.

"Most countries are facing a declining population. "

And yet global population continues to rise.
I guess those parts of Africa must be growing enormously...
What a conundrum.

"Maybe in the very long term a smaller population is better but the pain in getting there will be high"

Higher than continuing to grow and impacting the very structure of the earth?
I think not. Well, unless we adopt something like nuclear war as the solution.

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