This content was first published by Radio Free Asia, and it is now being reprinted with permission.
Officials in China have announced incentives to encourage people to have children and called for” a fresh marriage and pregnancy society” in response to declining birth rates, global school closures, and younger people who are increasingly choosing to stay single.
China’s government, the State Council, published a slew of actions on Monday, including pregnancy subsidies, better care for mothers and children, and thorough care services.
Authorities at all levels of government really “actively promote the traditional virtues of the Chinese state by encouraging marriage and pregnancy at the appropriate age,” according to the announcement.
Communist Party leader Xi Jinping has  , called on women , to focus on raising families, and the National People’s Congress has been , looking at ways , to raise flagging delivery costs and kick-start the shrinking population, including flexible working plans, coverage for fertility treatment and extended postpartum left.
However, today’s Chinese young women are increasingly choosing not to marry or have children, citing grave inequality and masculine beliefs that however permeate family life as well as the large financial strain of raising a family.
Officials may “vigorously promote , positive views of matrimony, relationships, pregnancy, and family” and build virtual matchmaking and dating services to help younger people to find partners, while getting rid of “lavish weddings and large wedding prices”, the State Council order said.
The Ministry of Education announced the steps after the number of preschools dropped by 5 % last month, with more than 14,800 closings, which is the second year of the decline.
School admissions fell by 5.35 million in 2023, a decrease of 11.55 % from 2022, the department said in characters commonly reported by Chinese internet.
Live births fell from 17.86 million in 2016 to just 9.02 million in 2023, with birth rates plummeting from 1.77 per woman in 2016 to around 1.0 in 2023, placing the country second from bottom among the world’s major economies.
Global trend
Peng Xiujian, a senior researcher at Australia’s Victoria University, said low fertility rates are part of a global trend, especially in Asia, where young people are generally unwilling to have children.
The new measures” will be slow to take effect, and it is impossible to change people’s willingness to have children all at once”, Peng said.
The State Council called on local governments to expand and support local childcare services, calling on the government to increase maternity leave from 98 days to 158 days, which would result in a maternity allowance in more than half of China’s provinces and allow childcare tax breaks of up to 2, 000 yuan ( US$ 288 ) per month.
But Peng said there are still huge barriers for women in the workplace who want to have families, and that issues like discrimination, flexible working and a , working culture that is heavily focused on long hours , would need to be addressed first.
The most recent measures, according to Jessica Nisén, a demographer at the University of Turku in Finland, would be “very good” for couples who already have children or have already decided to have them.
However, she added that” building a new marriage and childbearing culture will undoubtedly be challenging” and that more radical policies would require parents to have equal leave of absence to encourage shared responsibility.
She noted that the measures may have a “non-marginal” impact over the long term, but that the government needs to show that it is committed to gender equality rather than just setting top-down goals for the number of children born.
Before more women will even consider having children, a millennial who declined to be identified for fear of reprisals claimed that women’s rights at work, affordable medical care, and the cost of education must all be taken into account.
” The subsidies China is offering right now would n’t even make up one-tenth of the total cost of educating a child”, she said. It might seem as though they were a little more serious about this if they had paid for all of the costs of prenatal checkups and childbirth.
Recovery unlikely
In the current economic climate, Tomá Sobotka, deputy director of the Vienna Institute of Demography, cited high youth unemployment and” competitive or uncertain labor market prospects for many” as reasons for the long-term recovery of birth rates.
He claimed that ideological catchphrases like” a new marriage and childbearing culture” could have the opposite effect.
In a recent interview with RFA Mandarin, Sobotka stated that “government efforts to exhort younger generations to form a family may encounter resistance from the young people who are alienated by their poor future prospects.”
He claimed that the policy did n’t include universal benefits like affordable childcare, and that tax breaks would only serve as a benefit to wealthy couples.
” The new policies do not manage to address the broader perception of uncertainty, pressures, and lack of confidence about the future among the young generations today, which are driven by a mix of past experiences ( such as COVID lockdowns and uncertainties ), … unaffordable housing in large cities, miserable labor market prospects, and the economic squeeze that is hitting young adults the most”, he said.
” Until these issues are at least partly addressed, birth rates will not recover much”.
The birth rates have dropped, according to professor emeritus of sociology at Harvard University, and professor emeritus of sociology Martin Whyte claimed that the ruling Chinese Communist Party’s legitimacy as a government has been undermined by the party’s declining birth rates.
In a recent interview with RFA Mandarin, Whyte stated that there was a general assumption that the party and state in China were managing society fairly well and successfully and that the Chinese people were reaping from this. ” And now, I think it’s likely that, if there’s some new campaigns or whatever, people are much more likely to be skeptical or even critical”.
He said the campaigns to create a “new childbearing culture” could also backfire.
” Some of these things Xi Jinping claimed, such as to find ways for women to have more babies, are clearly creating derision in China”, he said. ” Young people and women, in particular, think this is absurd, and that Xi Jinping is completely out of touch with reality”.
According to Whyte,” the society Chinese are living in does not produce a situation where having three babies makes sense,” adding that many people in China believe that Xi’s three-year zero-COVID policy had undermined his legitimacy.
“]There are ] also other things like the housing sector crisis”, he said. China created incentives for neighborhood governments and developers to construct more housing than was actually required. And then with population shrinking … where is the competence of the party-state in allowing that to happen”?
A “very different place” is what.
Alicja Bachulska, a policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations, agreed.
” I would say … in 2023 we have felt a lot of frustration, a lot of disillusionment”, she said in a YouTube debate with Bonnie Glaser of the German Marshall Fund of the United States. “]The ] Chinese authorities ]are ] making quite arbitrary decisions that are not perceived any more in some circles as very rational”.
” I think the end of the zero-COVD policy, the street protests that took place in China at the end of 2022 made many people realize that the level of frustration with the current Chinese political elites had started to be really, really big,” she said.
This also has an effect on Beijing’s attempts to boost the birth rate, Bachulska said.
” For China, the solution is to convince most young women in China, well-educated middle class urban women, to have more children, and they are really trying hard to build this positive energy idea of how the demographic crisis in China will be turned into an opportunity”, she said. ” But then you have a massive crackdown on the feminist movement,” the statement reads.
Despite having no organized organizing skills, she said women in China are unlikely to support the authorities ‘ campaign for more children.
