Enforcers of China’s One-Child Policy Are Now Cajoling People to Have Three By Liyan Qi, June 5, 2023, WSJ

Using coercion and fines, China was adept at preventing couples from having children during the decades of its one-child policy. It has been less successful in fostering a “birth-friendly society.”

Births in China continue to fall despite the govt’s efforts to shift away from birth restrictions to encouraging all couples to have 3 kids. With a drop in its population last year, China is ceding its long-held title as the world’s most populous
country to India.

Chinese births have gone from around 18 million a year in 2016, when the one-child policy was scrapped, to below 10 million now, a drop of 46%. Even during starvation years in the early 1960s, when China’s population was less than half what it is now,
births never fell below 10 million.

The U.S. has also faced a drop in births in recent years, although not as dramatically as China. About 3.7 million babies were born in the U.S. in 2022, largely unchanged from 2021 and down 15% from the peak in 2017, federal data released Thursday showed.

In China, the new demographic reality has prompted a campaign to change the mind-set of a generation less eager to start a family, and rebuild a “pro-birth” culture.

At the center of the effort is the government-backed Family Planning Assn, which was originally set up in 1980 as a network of enforcers of the one-child policy and which has since been reprogrammed to focus on boosting births.

Wang Pei’an, the Communist Party chief at the association and for years a staunch defender of China’s birth restrictions, is leading the campaign for more babies. At a population forum earlier this year, he attributed China’s low birth numbers to
changing family values.

“Without nurturing the ideas of marriage and childbearing, it will be extremely difficult to improve the level of fertility,” Wang said.

In a park in Miyun, on the far outskirts of Beijing, the local govt has installed sculptures of two parents playing with three children. The Miyun branch of the Family Planning Assn has set up a squad of 500 people to “promote the new-style marriage
and birth culture.”

Officials have given out gifts such as rice cookers and water bottles to women attending events centered on showing that getting married and having children is a good thing.

In March, local officials organized a hike for more than 50 younger female workers at a local gardening company to strengthen the women’s physical fitness and make them more attuned to the values of marriage and starting a family.

Similar to how in the past local officials were evaluated on how well they enforced the one-child policy, officials in Miyun will be judged partly on whether they can shift the trend in marriage and births, the local family planning assn said in a
statement in early May.

Miyun was selected as one of 20 testing grounds for the new birth-culture campaign, launched last year. In another city, Baoding in Hebei province, local officials in April organized a matchmaking event for young people who dressed up in traditional Han
dynasty costumes.

In the southeastern city of Ningbo, to encourage men to play a bigger role in raising children, officials lauded “penguin dads”—a reference to how penguin parents take turns keeping eggs warm and taking care of the chicks.

Last month, authorities said that on top of the 20 cities, where the government says the campaign has increased “family happiness,” another 20 cities had been added to the testing grounds.

Turning things around is an uphill battle.

At a Beijing mall on Thursday, Yang Ri, a 35-year-old state-sector employee, said she spends up to $28,000 a year on food, toys and after-school classes for her daughter, a first-grader, and can’t afford another child. “All of a sudden, we’re
expected to have three children without any help. That’s unreasonable,” she said.

Li Juan, who works in finance, said she feels bad that her son is growing up as an only child, but with no child-care help, she would have to quit her job if she were to have another child. “It isn’t simply a matter of a lack of subsidies,” said Li,
40.

Thursday was Kid’s Day in China, and schools were closed. Both Yang and Li had to take time off from work for lack of other child care.

Many young Chinese have soured on marrying and starting a family. Marriage registration has dropped for years and declined further during China’s Covid-19 lockdown. Local data indicated that the numbers dropped even over the May 20 weekend, a
traditional peak of marriage registrations because the date sounds like “I love you” in Chinese, offering a peek into the current marriage situation.

The Ministry of Civil Affairs, which normally releases a set of data that includes the number of marriages, divorces and cremations in any given quarter, hasn’t released any reports since last year’s third quarter. Some sociologists and demographers
say the govt has been reluctant to publicize cremation data that may point to a surge in excess deaths after Beijing abruptly abandoned nearly all Covid-19 restrictions late last year.

Neither the Ministry of Civil Affairs nor the Family Planning Assn responded to requests for comment.

Based on the latest data the ministry published, marriage registrations dropped 7.5% over the first three quarters of last year compared with a year earlier.

While there have been efforts to lower the cost of rearing a child, there has been no nationwide rollout of financial incentives for parents. It is left to cash-strapped local govts to provide the monetary rewards and child-care assistance that
demographers say would help change young people’s minds.

Huang Wenzheng, a researcher with the Center for China and Globalization, a think tank in Beijing, said that without cash incentives, China won’t be able to lift its fertility rate.

Earlier this year, the city of Shenzhen announced a plan to give local residents up to about $1,420 as a lump-sum birth bonus and up to about $426 a year in child-rearing costs until the child is 3 years old.

James Liang, a well-known businessman and a research professor of economics at Peking University, has estimated that to raise the fertility rate to the replacement level of 2.1, the govt needs to subsidize families by an average of one million yuan, or
around $140,000, per child in the form of cash, tax rebates, and housing and daycare subsidies.

Other countries that rolled out substantial birth and child-rearing subsidies have had limited success. Singapore has in recent years tried to offer cash grants for new parents, public housing for young couples, preschool subsidies and assisted
reproduction and fertility treatments. Yet the fertility rate in Singapore remains stubbornly low, like China’s hovering just above 1.

“The impact of all these policies is really rather minor,” said John Casterline, a demographer at Ohio State University. “There has to be a cultural shift, with parenting and having kids becoming of higher priority against other things.”

If the norm in China is that parents make maximum investment in their children, then parents will favor having one child instead more, Casterline added, though govt policies and programs can send signals to nudge cultural values in the direction of
having more children, he said.

A primary concern for young Chinese is the difficulty in securing a steady income. The unemployment rate for Chinese in the 16-24 age group hit a record 20% in April, a problem many economists attribute to a jobs mismatch that could defy govt solutions
for years.

Paradoxically, some of the job losses over the past year were caused by Beijing’s measures to make it more affordable to raise children. Crackdowns on property developers to rein in runaway housing prices and on costly private tutoring services
resulted in layoffs for many in those sectors.

A 27-year old who was laid off from a private tech firm in Beijing last year said he had since submitted more than 200 résumés and attended eight job interviews but hasn’t landed a job. “I thought things would be better this year, but it feels
worse,” he said. He said he has no plan to marry his girlfriend until after he finds a job. His attitude illustrates the challenge in changing the mind-set of a generation of only kids.

Yi Fuxian, a U.S.-based scientist who has long been a critic of China’s one-child policy, said: “Having children is not a water tap, you can’t simply turn it off and then turn it on.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-faces-uphill-battle-as-it-tries-to-instill-pro-birth-culture-2ce7a24a

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