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The Chinese Communist Party, which has recently allowed couples to have three children, is struggling so much to bolster its population that some provinces have now resorted to encouraging citizens to have as many babies as they want, even if unmarried.
China’s population of approximately 1 billion shrank in 2022 for the first time since the 1960s, which has compelled the Chinese Communist Party to introduce numerous measures aimed at incentivizing citizens to have more children.
But the problem isn’t that the Chinese people don’t want children, it’s that they can’t afford them.
From DNYUZ:
Many young Chinese adults, who themselves were born during China’s draconian one-child policy, are pushing back on the government’s inducements to have babies in a country that is among the most expensive in the world to raise a child. To them, such incentives do little to address anxieties about supporting their aging parents and managing the rising costs of education, housing and health care.
“The fundamental problem is not that people cannot have children, but that they cannot afford it,” said Lu Yi, a 26-year-old nurse in Sichuan, the province that recently lifted birth limits. She added that she would need to earn at least double her current monthly salary of 8,000 yuan, or about $1,200, to even consider having children.
Many countries around the world — from Japan to Russia to Sweden — have confronted the same demographic challenge, and their attempts to incentivize new babies with subsidies and other tactics have had a limited impact. But China has aged faster than other countries. The often harshly enforced one-child policy, which was aimed at slowing population growth, precipitated the steep decline in births and led to a generational shift in attitudes around family sizes.
Efforts by the ruling Communist Party to raise fertility rates — by permitting all couples to have two children in 2016, then three in 2021 — have struggled to gain traction. The new policy in Sichuan drew widespread attention because it essentially disregards birth limits altogether, showing how the demographic crisis is nudging the party to slowly relinquish its iron grip over the reproductive rights of its citizens.
The new policy of Sichuan, which has a population of 84 million, to waive birth rate restrictions may likely be adopted by the rest of the country.
“The two-child policy failed. The three-child policy failed,” said Yi Fuxian, a researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who studied Chinese population trends. “This is the natural next step.”
But nearly two-thirds of young people in China aren’t interested in having children, largely for economic reasons, with refusals to have children being seen as civil disobedience.
In the aftermath of the country’s Covid-19 lockdowns, nearly one in five Chinese people between the ages of 16 and 24 are unemployed, compounding the disillusionment of a generation in which many see the refusal to have children as an act of political resistance.
In a survey last year of about 20,000 younger Chinese people, mostly from 18 to 25, two-thirds of respondents said they did not want to have children. Demographers cite the costs and pressures of the Chinese educational system as a major concern, recommending policy solutions like shortening schooling by two years and eliminating the competitive exam for entrance to high school.
This population crisis in China comes as the communist nation attempts to assert a leadership role of mediating the geopolitical quagmire of the Ukraine conflict.