In China, young adults are wary of incentives to boost birthrate
In China, a country that limits most couples to three children, one province is making a bold pitch to try to get its citizens to procreate: have as many babies as you want, even if you are unmarried.
The initiative, which came into effect last month, points to the renewed urgency of China’s efforts to spark a baby boom after its population shrank last year for the first time since a national famine in the 1960s. Other efforts are underway — officials in several cities have urged college students to donate sperm to help spur population growth, and there are plans to expand national insurance coverage for fertility treatments, including in vitro fertilization.
But the measures have been met with a wave of skepticism, ridicule and debate, highlighting the challenges China faces as it seeks to stave off a shrinking workforce that could imperil economic growth.
Many young adults, who 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, 26, a nurse in Sichuan, the province that recently lifted birth limits. She said she would need to earn at least double her current monthly salary of $1,200 to even consider having children.
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.
“The two-child policy failed. The three-child policy failed,” said Yi Fuxian, a researcher at the University of Wisconsin-madison who has studied Chinese population trends. “This is the natural next step.”
Sichuan, the country’s fifth-largest province with 84 million people, lifted all limits on the number of children that residents can register with the local government, a process that qualifies parents for paid parental leave and reimbursed hospital bills. In an unusual move, it also included parents who are unmarried. Previously only married couples were allowed to register children (and only up to three).
In most parts of China, single mothers are denied the government benefits offered to married couples.
Until recently, some provinces had even imposed fines on unmarried women who gave birth. But the baby shortage has prompted provinces like Sichuan to start legally recognizing children born to single mothers, part of a Communist Party push toward more “inclusive” population policies.
Women’s rights advocates have celebrated this trend as a win for unmarried mothers.
Still, Zhang Meng, 47, a single mother in Shanghai, said China has been too slow in expanding the rights of nontraditional families.
Zhang found out she was pregnant in 2016, soon after breaking up with her boyfriend. She was 40 years old at the time and decided to keep the baby, worried that it might be her only opportunity to have one.
After her son was born, her application for paid maternity leave and medical bill reimbursement — which are provided to married couples — was rejected.
She sued local agencies for the money. Years later, in 2021, she received about $10,200 from the government. But the obstacles for women like her go far beyond compensation, she said.
“What many women, especially single mothers, lack is not money, but the protection of their rights and the respect of society,” Zhang said.
Women’s rights advocates have argued that the government’s effort to raise fertility rates risks reinforcing discrimination against women. Already, job listings sometimes explicitly seek only men or women who already have children; when China began allowing couples to have three children, women worried that employers reluctant to pay for maternity leave would be even less willing to hire them.
“Until China fundamentally transforms its social institutions and has more gender equality, women can vote with their wombs,” said Wang Feng, a professor at the University of California at Irvine who specializes in China’s demographics.
Along with building up sperm banks, officials are also doing more to expand access to treatments like IVF. Yet experts have noted that declining birthrates are related more to economic and cultural shifts than to infertility.
In the aftermath of the country’s COVID-19 lockdowns, nearly 1 in 5 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.