Chinese authorities ask: Dear newlywed, when’s the baby arriving?
(Reuters) - An online post about a newlywed in China, who was rung up by her local government asking if she was pregnant, garnered tens of thousands of comments on Thursday before being removed, with many netizens saying they had experienced similar calls.
The debate comes on the heels of President Xi Jinping declaring at the Communist Party’s 20th Congress last week that China would establish a policy to boost birth rates and improve the country’s population development strategy.
In the post on Weibo, a Twitter-like service, a user named ‘lost shuyushou’ described a colleague’s experience in which the colleague answered a call from the Nanjing city government’s women’s health service.
The post quoted the colleague as saying she was told by an official that the local government “wants newlyweds to be pregnant within a year and their target is to make a phone call every quarter.”
The Nanjing municipal government and the National Health Commission did not immediately respond to Reuters requests for comment.
The post was taken down a few hours after it was posted along with all the comments.