By refusing to countenance motherhood, Beijing-based secretary Zhang Hanjing – along with hundreds of thousands of women also of childbearing age – is giving Chinese authorities a headache.
Zhang, who says she is also unwilling to marry, is in perfect health and financially capable of raising a child, but watching her friends go through the experience in recent years – some with their second or third children – has only deterred her.
The exhaustion and the peer pressure faced by young mothers frightened her, Zhang said. “You hire a babysitter because all the others are doing it, you sign your kid up to extracurricular activities for the same reason.”
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For Zhang, and many like her, the stress and pain of giving birth far outweigh the benefits in China, where many mothers face the toil of childcare alone and often have to worry about giving up or losing their jobs as well.
This is despite the repeated easing of birth restrictions – from the end of the one-child policy in 2015 to today’s encouragement of women to have three children – to stem China’s population decline.
Local authorities have also offered incentives to new mothers, but they face an uphill battle to deliver the demographic shift required to implement President Xi Jinping’s ambitious plans for economic growth and innovation – central to his promise for the “great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation”.
Xi has repeatedly referred to China’s ageing population as a “comprehensive, long-term and strategic” issue.
In 2020, during the once-a-decade national census, Xi said that grasping the changing population trend would support the country’s plans for high-quality economic and social development.
Yi Fuxian, one of the first demographers to warn about China’s population decline, said the issue had potential to be elevated to a national security level.
Yi, a senior scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, sounded the alarm 15 years ago in his book Big Country with an Empty Nest, which criticised China’s family planning policy of restricting couples to one child and foreshadowed the impacts of a resulting demographic shift on the country’s workforce and economy.
This month, for the first time, China’s National Health Commission (NHC) predicted negative population growth by 2025. Last year, just 480,000 people were added – the lowest growth in six decades, according to official data.
The problem is that China’s elderly population is increasing – at a huge cost to public services – while the size of families remains stubbornly small.
Government figures suggest that by 2025 there will be more than 300 million people over the age of 60, or 20 per cent of the population. At the same time, Chinese women surveyed by the NHC last year were found to be increasingly unwilling to have children.
On average, women said they were raising or planned to raise an average of 1.64 children, compared with 1.76 in 2017. And the number dropped to 1.48 and 1.54, respectively for women in their 20s and 30s.
Drop in newborn screening underscores China’s birth crisis
Marriage has also fallen out of favour, with the number of first-time marriages falling from 23.8 million in 2013 to 12.2 million in 2020.
Chinese authorities have been trying to reverse the trend. In July, 17 ministries under the State Council issued a policy document introducing flexible working arrangements, preferential housing policies and tax breaks.
And as of August, some 30 provinces or cities had extended maternity and paternity leave, to a total of more than six months in some areas.
China also launched a nationwide survey last month into what is driving the country’s declining marriage and birth rates. A total of 20,000 people aged 20-44 will take part, from across 100 counties, districts and cities.
In a new survey, China asks why its citizens are unwilling to have kids
Questions revolve around childbirth plans and problems experienced with policies around marriage, starting a family and child rearing. Respondents are also asked what services they would like to see to make parenting easier.
So far, the government’s offers barely scratch the surface of the problem, according to Eileen Yang, 36, who is in a stable relationship and works as a website editor in Beijing.
“You can barely keep a child alive with this assistance, but people usually want more for the child [than that],” she said.
“I’m OK with my child [growing up to be] a cashier, but my boyfriend won’t be, and my parents won’t be, and I’m not sure my child will naturally be good at academics and climb up the social ladder. Besides, blue-collar workers barely make enough to scrape by in China, unlike in Western countries.”
Yang said she had read that some countries offered cash stipends in a bid to solve their own population crises. In New Zealand, women pay little from pregnancy through child rearing and there is legal protection against being fired, she has heard.
While she believes there may be more beneficial policies on the horizon in China, Yang does not have high expectations. Currently, she is more concerned with raising her Russian Blue cat than a baby.
“Unless they offer me cash directly – but even then, I would have to think about it,” she said.
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Yi identifies three main reasons for the declining birth rate.
“The young generation does not find having children psychologically appealing. They not only don’t want to have kids, but don’t even want to get married. Furthermore, young people are not financially capable of raising children on their own,” he said.
As a side effect, people planning to have children when they are older were more likely to face the hurdle of infertility, Yi said.
With limited resources and ever-decreasing mobility between classes, many people are pouring money into the care and education of their children, as well as investing in a good home.
Government restrictions on assisted reproductive technology for unmarried couples is ruling out another potential – albeit small – group who want to have children – unmarried women.
Last month, unmarried writer Teresa Xu appealed a court ruling which denied her the right to freeze her eggs. Xu began her legal action in 2019 after the Beijing Obstetrics and Gynaecology Hospital refused to perform the procedure, only available to married women with fertility problems.
But there have been small improvements for unmarried women. The Legislative Affairs Commission of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress recently demanded local governments remove the hurdles against maternity benefits for single mothers.
How new measures in China are trying to reverse declining birth rate
The commission’s commentary was welcomed by Dong Xiaoying, a Guangzhou-based lawyer and founder of the Advocates for a Diverse Family Network, which has been supporting several single mothers in their fight for maternity benefits from their local governments.
“Considering some previous policies, such as cancelling the social compensation fee – fines for people having children out of wedlock or having more children than allowed – this seems like a continuous policy on the government’s part, considered from the point of the population crisis on a whole,” she said.
But to some would-be parents and observers such as Yi, these policies are too little, too late.
“China’s current population policies are powerless against the birth rate decline, not to mention increasing it,” Yi said.
Potential strategies included strengthening family values and lowering housing prices, he said, as well as encouraging young people to not congregate in big cities, increasing employment, and lowering the legal age for marriage.
Yi noted that high housing prices were putting even more pressure on families, but if the real estate market shrank there would be a financial shortfall for the local governments that funded maternity leave and other benefits.
With disposable income making up just 44 per cent of China’s GDP, many families were struggling to raise one child, not to mention a second or third, Yi said.
More from South China Morning Post:
- China population: pension burden in the spotlight as more than a third of provinces have 20 per cent of population aged above 60
- China launches new maternity, marital survey in bid to staunch population loss
- China’s zero-Covid-19 policy must end soon after sacrifices made by population to endure lockdowns, other control measures
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