Where’s the Money?America should draw a lesson from China’s failing birthrate-boosting efforts.
Carmel Richardson
Jun 9, 2023
During the Chinese famine of 1958–1961, the country’s total births never fell below 10 million. Today, with a population double that size, the country’s total births are the same. In the face of a rapidly aging and shrinking populace, the Chinese Communist Party is now actively urging Chinese women to have an average of three babies, raising this benchmark for the second time since 2016, when the one-child policy officially ended.
Two years into this three child policy, fertility is still at an all-time low. One reason for this may be the route the Chinese Communist Party’s Family Planning Association has chosen to enforce it, which, as the Wall Street Journal reported Monday, has been largely through art, education, and gimmicks in place of more straightforward financial incentives. A local government outside Beijing has apparently installed two statues depicting families, each with two parents and three children, as a means of shaping the cultural imagination. Meanwhile, party officials have begun encouraging fathers to be more present in their children’s lives. They also hand out free rice cookers and water bottles to mothers and young women who attend pro-family conferences as a means of encouraging domesticity.
This has not been enough to change women’s minds, or at least not right away. Unfortunately, the country doesn’t have much time to troubleshoot with free wonton wrappers and three-kid television shows. When the CCP officially ended the one-child policy in 2016, the country’s total births were at approximately 18 million per year. Less than a decade later, they are just over half of that, and total fertility is well below replacement rates for the population.
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Instead, fertility has continued to plummet. The nation’s total fertility rate, defined as the number of children a woman has over her lifetime, has already fallen below that of Japan to 1.33, considered a “lowest low” number. Now, Wang is championing three babies with as much vigor as he defended the one-child policy in the past.
It’s not hard to imagine why this is happening. After nearly four decades of high abortion rates—some forced on women, even those with no children, as in the “Hundred Days, No Child” campaign—Chinese culture is being expected to flip on a dime. Women who were raised as only children, whose every peer had no sibling, and whose parents likely had no siblings, are suddenly expected to change their understanding of what is normal. To these would-be parents, the idea of having three kids is, plain and simple, strange.
This new normal affects family structure as well as family size: Chinese women have been encouraged for decades to put off childbearing for career advancement, and many have done so. Unsurprisingly, their choice has come with a steep drop in marriage rates, a key factor in total fertility.
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Source:
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/wheres-the-money/
