Beijing wanted couples to have fewer children. Now, as China’s population ages and is so disproportionately male as to portend long-term problems, the government suddenly wants more kids. That’s going to be a difficult goal to reach.
The latest indication that China’s policy towards family size is likely to change is that a Chinese state-run newspaper posted on its official Weibo account, a popular Chinese social media platform, that the content on family planning had been removed from the draft civil code that Chinese lawmakers reviewed on Monday.
The freedom to procreate would would be a huge shift for a country that is still often associated with its one-child policy, often enforced through coerced abortions.
In 1979, the Chinese government limited all parents to one child. Before that, there had been laws that limited couples to two children. Until the one child policy was repealed in 2015, families, with some exceptions for minorities and rural parents (and, of course, those capable of paying bribes) would face hefty fines and potentially forced contraception or sterilization if they exceeded government limits. As the law currently stands, every family can now have two children although, if recent indicators are correct, even those limits may soon be lifted.
Even with new, less restrictive policies, however, parents have not had more children. After the end of the one child policy, birthrates in China did rise about 8 percent in 2016, but they then fell by 3.5 percent in 2017, indicating that a boom in population is unlikely.
Part of the reason is that laws create social norms and affect how people think about a good and normal family size. In China, changing social norms was actually part of the goal. Propaganda in the form of murals and posters touted the benefits of one child and the supposed dangers of overpopulation.
That propaganda and the laws, however, are only a small part of the story. The larger reason is not unique to China: As countries develop and industrialize, births tend to decrease regardless of government or laws. As more people go to universities, young people get married later. Persistent social ideas about the need for men to be able to provide for a woman before proposing marriage, combined with rising home prices, also contribute to later marriages and thus fewer children. Additionally, as in other developed countries, there is a perception that raising a child is prohibitively expensive. In short, the laws mirrored trends that were already taking place.
But this has Chinese officials worried. As a result of years of the one child policy, China faces not only an aging population paired with fewer working young people to support them, but also a shortage of young women who can bear the next generation. Due to years of the one-child policy and cultural and social preferences for males, there are now far fewer women than men. That means that many men will not be able to find wives. There is even speculation that this could cause social unrest — single, frustrated, young men are not, after all, known for their stability-promoting behaviors.
Perhaps, as some have joked, new propaganda will replace the old, this time encouraging bigger families.
Already, Beijing seems to be considering this, as a stamp released earlier this year featured a family of pigs with not one or two but three piglets. (This is the sort of divination that Chinese citizens must resort to in order to discern the government’s intentions.) Without more substantial shifts in costs, education and other factors, that propaganda is unlikely to push young couples to have more children.
Part of the reason the propaganda worked so well before was that it mirrored existing population trends. This time, that’s not the case. Having more children is literally an uphill battle.
