The average birth rate of the world is about 18.5 births per 1000 people. In India, it's about 17.64 births per 1000 people. In the curious case of China concerning its history of the One-child Policy, its birth rate is about 7.52 per 1000 people. Despite various measures taken by the government to increase the birth rate, the country has hit its record low for the fifth consecutive year. This led Beijing last year to begin allowing couples to have up to three children.
Why are individuals in their youth not having kids?
Chinese men are single and women do not desire children. Having children in China is very exhausting. The cost of living in China is very high, making children an expense rather than a want. Schools and nannies are so expensive that middle-class people find it had to afford them. Many people simply cannot afford to raise children amid the rising costs of living, they say.
"People's reluctance to have children doesn't lie in the process of childbearing, but what comes after," Dr Mu said.
"The reality is that there aren't many good jobs out there for women, and the women who do have good jobs will want to do whatever it takes to keep them. Who would dare have kids in this situation?" one person asked. On Chinese social media, the issue is a hot topic, with the hashtag "why this generation of young people is unwilling to have babies" being read more than 440 million times on microblogging platform Weibo.
The one-child policy
The one-child policy was implemented in China between 1980 and 2015. The country feared the rapidly growing population in the 70s and this population planning initiative was introduced to curb it. It allowed couples to have only one child. It had widespread social, cultural and economic effects on the country. It has always been a topic of controversy.
The CCP credits the program for preventing 400 million births but many scholars deny these claims. The program mainly affected Chinese women. Patriarchy and a cultural preference for having sons led to many cruel methods of getting rid of infant girls. Women were mentally and physically assaulted by their husbands and their family to have a boy child even though she had no control over it.
Many female babies were killed, forcefully aborted and few were adopted abroad. In the 1980s 80% of women were forcefully sterilised by inserting IUDs. However, the policy also resulted in greater workforce participation by women who would otherwise have been occupied with childrearing and some girls received greater familial investment in their education.
How could this be problematic for China?
Due to the one-child policy, there is no balance between the working population and the retired population.
Its decades-long one-child policy had contributed to a rapidly ageing population and shrinking workforce that could severely distress the country's economic and social stability. The sex ratio in China is very poor due to not wanting infant girls.
The number of births was just enough to outnumber deaths, with the population growing by 480,000 to 1.4126 billion. The natural growth rate fell to 0.034%, the lowest since China's great famine from 1959 to 1961, which killed tens of millions of people and led to a population decline. Experts suggest a combination of factors, from "a decrease in the number of women of childbearing age, a continued decline in fertility, changes in attitudes toward childbearing and delays of marriage by young people," including due to the pandemic.
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