China’s population outlook worrying as young people baulk at high cost of having kids
- China’s ageing population is the least of concerns for young people who can barely afford to make ends meet, much less have children
- Huge income-to-debt ratio said to be ‘most effective contraceptive’ for millennials, Generation Z
This is the third in a series of stories about China’s once-a-decade census conducted in 2020. The world’s most populous nation released its national demographic data on Tuesday, and the figures will have far-reaching social policy and economic implications.
China’s young people are not surprised that their homeland has one of the world’s lowest fertility rates. In fact, most seem to empathise with the growing reluctance to have kids in China.
Many believe that there is a general consensus among China’s millennials and Generation Z that having children will impose a strong financial burden under the country’s current public welfare conditions, and that having fewer or no children is necessary to maintain one’s quality of life.
“Honestly, I don’t want to have a relationship, I don’t want to get married, and I don’t want to have children,” said Zhang Jie, a 31-year-old salesman with a small private trading company in Guangzhou who recently broke up with his girlfriend after four years. “For the working class, it is simply becoming more and more unaffordable to raise a child in urban cities.”
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China’s fertility rate also fell to 1.3 children per woman, which is well below the replacement level of 2.1 – the rate needed for a stable population. By comparison, Japan’s fertility rate was 1.369 in 2020.
Zhang’s family tree is among those that look like an inverted pyramid, and it reflects the attitude of many young Chinese people toward marriage and childbirth.
When young people believe that they lose far more than they gain by having children, what can persuade them to give birth?
His maternal grandmother had 10 children in the 1950s and 1960s. Among his mother’s siblings, however, only her oldest sister gave birth to three children in the 1970s, and the remaining nine were restricted by the nation’s one-child policy and gave birth to only one child in the 1980s and 1990s.
“I see them all having a hard time balancing income and expenses, and all of them are asking their parents to help take care of their kids, spending their parents’ savings to put down payments on property and even to subsidise their living expenses,” Zhang said of his cousins.
“Honestly, seeing their life makes me fear marriage now, let alone having children. That’s the reason my girlfriend and I broke up.”
In a public survey in November on Weibo, China’s leading social media platform asked, “How many children would you be willing to have if birth restrictions were fully liberalised?”
Among the 284,000 people who voted, 150,000 said they would still have no kids, 85,000 said one child, 39,000 chose two, and about 10,000 said they would be willing to have three children or more.
The results were very similar to a survey conducted by Evergrande Research Institute in 2019, in which 160,000 people voted on their willingness to have children.
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The soaring cost of child-rearing, coupled with a high ratio of personal debt, means that Chinese people born after 1990 are the least willing group to get married and have children, compared with previous generations.
On China’s social media platforms, there are endless posts discussing the financial burden and challenges associated with having a child.
China’s marriage numbers last year declined 12.2 per cent year on year to 8.13 million, according to figures released by the Ministry of Civil Affairs. The totals were 10.14 million in 2018 and 13.47 million in 2013.
“I think our young generation takes a very different view on having children compared with Chinese in the past,” said Wendy Li, a 34-year-old single white-collar worker from Shanghai.
“Those born in the 1940s and 1950s had four or more children per family … and those born in the 1960s and 1970s had only a child because of government restrictions. But we [millennials and Gen Z] increasingly feel that we won’t have any children if it would reduce our quality of life.”
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That’s an increase from 254 million at the end of 2019. For those over the age of 65, the figure surged from 176 million in 2019 to 190 million in 2020, now accounting for 13.5 per cent of the population.
By 2050, according to a report last year by the China Development Research Foundation, China will have more than 500 million people aged 60 or above, or nearly one-third of the projected total population at the time.
From 1970 to 2015, the median age of the Chinese population rose rapidly, from 19.3 years old to 37, and it is expected to reach 50 in 2050.
Under current scenarios, China’s population looks to decline by 32 million people between 2019 and 2050, whereas the US will add 50 million, according to China’s central bank.
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Huang Wenzheng, a demography expert and senior researcher with the Centre for China and Globalisation think tank, said all of society must be mobilised to change young people’s attitudes towards childbirth.
He also said that much of the public believes that overpopulation is the cause of many social and economic problems in the country.
“When young people believe that they lose far more than they gain by having children, what can persuade them to give birth?” he asked.
Major hurdles to increasing the nation’s fertility rate include a steady decline in the number of women able and willing to have children, along with the soaring costs of raising them – i.e. childcare, education, larger homes, etc.
China nearing ‘turning point’ as slowing birth rate points to economic risks
According to the Evergrande Research Institute, the number of Chinese women aged between 20 and 35 reached a peak of 190 million in 1997. That total had dropped to about 170 million in 2017, and it is expected to fall to 110 million by 2030.
And according to a consumption report released in 2019 by Tmall.com, the biggest business-to-consumer e-commerce platform in China, consumer spending associated with raising children increased by 60 per cent from 2016 to 2019 among Chinese parents aged 25 or younger.
A 2017 report on schooling costs, published by Sina Education, said education expenditures on average accounted for 26 per cent of a family’s annual income in the preschool period, 21 per cent in the primary and secondary school period, and 29 per cent in the college period.
And data released last year by the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences showed that raising a child from birth to junior high in Shanghai’s affluent Jingan district cost an average of 800,000 yuan (US$124,000).
Additionally, an HSBC survey in 2019 showed that the debt-to-income ratio of China’s youth born in the 1990s had reached a staggering 1,850 per cent. That same year, the Yuekai Securities Research Institute found that university graduates with degrees in computer science earned the highest income among their peers, pulling in an average of 6,858 yuan a month.
Even in China’s rural areas, many people find it difficult to raise a child on the average local incomes.
“The one-year tuition for kindergarten costs between 5,000 yuan (US$772) and 10,000 yuan in our county,” said Yu Mingqian, a 21-year-old woman in Biyang county, Henan province, who plans on having no more than two children.
“Most of my friends and classmates are still single and living in first-tier cities,” said Stela Peng, a Shenzhen-based woman in her early thirties. “Mortgages exceeded most of our income, and it is a 30-year repayment cycle. Each of us also has various types of debts, such as credit cards and online consumption loans. Our desire to give birth is almost zero.
“To be frank, the issue of ageing is too far away from us. We still have so many loans to repay every month, and this is, actually, the most effective contraceptive.”
