If China wants more babies, it needs a better understanding of young people
- Rather than castigating young people, a more productive approach involves acknowledging they may well have different aspirations from previous generations
- Until China and others in the region wake up to this new social reality, they will have to live with very low fertility and all its consequences
Of course, the root causes of such macro changes in population growth and structure are simple: people are living longer, and women are having fewer children. Obviously, we don’t want to see mortality increasing, so attention quickly turns to adapting the fertility rate.
The census itself revealed that China in 2020 had a total fertility rate of just 1.3 – lower than that of Japan. Covid-19 and its fallout undoubtedly pushed fertility lower last year, and the method of deriving fertility rates from census data often generates an undercount. Despite these factors, there is no point denying that fertility in China is very low.
Under these circumstances of concern about the low fertility rate, the immediate response of many was to ask, why are there any restrictions at all?
First, we need to think about what “replacement rate” means. Because men can’t (yet) bear children, women need to have at least two children each to replace a population. The first issue here, though, is that it is not only fertility that drives population change: migration also plays a key part.
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Taking this into account, the rate necessary to replace a population in a high-immigration society may be as low as 0.6 births per woman. This, however, is not the case in China, where international immigration is low and, frankly, unlikely to change in the near to medium term.
The second issue relates to the simple fact that overall fertility rates are calculated as an average of births per woman. What this means is that, to end up with an average of around 2, every woman with one child needs to be balanced out by a woman who has three, and every childless woman by a woman with four children.
According to the latest estimates by the China Population and Development Research Centre, women born in the 1990s intend to have just 1.66 children on average. Strikingly, the ideal number – more of an aspiration, leaving aside considerations such as cost and impact on career – is still less than two.
At the moment, the childless rate in China is very low. However, attitudes are changing, and there is a general expectation that this will increase sharply in the near future.
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Meanwhile, the appetite for three or more children is, and has been, very muted. In a famous 2009 study of fertility ideals in Jiangsu province, just 1 per cent of respondents stated a preference for three or four children.
Of course, we have to be somewhat cautious about interpreting Chinese surveys on fertility preferences as these are often performed by the same people who would enforce compliance with the prevailing policy.
We then need to look at the motivations for having fewer children in both rural and urban China. Among the middle class, the high direct costs of childbearing (and especially of extracurricular education), as well as the severe penalty mothers face at work because of imbalance in care obligations, inadequate childcare, poor work culture and overt discrimination, are regularly mentioned.
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Blue-collar and agricultural workers, meanwhile, consistently state an aspiration for their children to have better opportunities than they had. In this sense, the context of childbearing in China is hardly different from in South Korea, Japan and Singapore.
Even in middle-income countries such as Thailand, Vietnam and parts of India, family sizes are curtailed for precisely the same reasons. In all of these settings, the appetite for three and four children is very muted.
Investment in policies to support and promote childbearing have had little effect across the region. If governments are seriously worried about low fertility, what is instead required in China and elsewhere is a complete reorientation of societal institutions – from governments to companies and multi-generational families – towards younger people.
Rather than castigating them for being feckless, individualistic and selfish, a much more productive approach involves acknowledging that they may well have different aspirations from preceding generations and recognising the difficulties they face in reconciling work with starting, and growing, a family – especially in the traditional, expected way.
Until China and other territories in the region wake up to this new social reality – and really start doing big things to support reproductive aspirations, rather than blame and cajole younger people – they are simply going to have to get used to very low fertility and all of its consequences.
Stuart Gietel-Basten is professor of public policy and social science at The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
