Birth rate at historic low alarms officials in China

China announced this Monday (17) that its birth rate fell in 2021 for the fifth year in a row. With that, the world’s most populous country has moved one step closer to the potentially seismic moment when its population will begin to shrink, accelerating a demographic crisis that could weaken its economic dynamism and even its political stability.

Added to the increase in life expectancy that has accompanied the country’s economic transformation over the past four decades, the falling birth rate means that the number of people of working age continues to fall in proportion to the growing number of people too old to work. This conjuncture can lead to a shortage of labor, something that will hamper economic growth and reduce the tax revenue needed to sustain a society with more and more elderly people.

This situation is creating a huge political problem for Beijing, which is already facing economic headwinds. Along with the demographics, the country announced on Monday that economic growth had dropped to 4% in the last quarter of last year.

The Communist Party, which governs the country, has already adopted measures to combat the decline in birth rates, relaxing its notorious “one-child policy”: in 2016 it began allowing couples to have two children, and since last year they can have up to two children. three. Incentives are also being offered to families with young children, and improvements in early childhood education and workplace standards are promised.

None of this has been able to reverse an undeniable truth: more and more Chinese women don’t want to have children.

“China faces a demographic crisis that transcends the imagination of Chinese officials and the international community,” says Yi Fuxian, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He has argued for years that Chinese Communist Party leaders were releasing demographic figures that underestimate the seriousness of the situation.

According to data announced on Monday by the National Bureau of Statistics, the number of births in the country dropped to 10.6 million in 2021, against 12 million the previous year. It was even lower than in 1961, when the Great Leap Forward, Mao Tse-tung’s economic plan, led to starvation and death on a massive scale.

It is quite possible that the Chinese population will soon begin to shrink for the first time since the Great Leap Forward. The number of people who died in 2021 – 10.1 million – was very close to the number of births, according to figures released on Monday. Some demographers think the demographic peak may already be over.

“The year 2021 will go down in Chinese history as the year in which China saw its population grow for the last time in its long history,” says Wang Feng, a professor of sociology at the University of California at Irvine. According to him, the birth rate seen in 2021 fell short of even the most pessimistic estimates.

Other wealthy societies are experiencing a similar decline, but most experts agree that China’s situation has been complicated by the unintended legacy of the government’s one-child policy, which between 1980 and 2015 rigidly policed ​​women’s reproductive choices.

While the objective of this policy was to slow the birth rate to promote economic growth, one effect of this policy was that there are fewer women reaching reproductive age today. The government relaxed restrictions on family planning just as economic and social conditions began to improve for women, who began to delay marriage and motherhood. Many Chinese women do not want children at all.

“I don’t want to spend my savings on children,” explained Wang Mingkun, 28, who lives in Beijing and teaches Korean. “I don’t hate children. In fact, I even like them. I just don’t want to have children myself.”

As the one-child rule has been a mainstay of Communist Party policy for decades, questions surrounding its consequences have become politically divisive. Last week, when a leading economist wrote that solving China’s falling birthrate would need to print trillions of banknotes, he was promptly censored online.

Ren Zeping, the economist in question, wrote in an academic article he posted on social media that if Beijing set aside the equivalent of $313 billion to help pay for aid such as cash incentives, tax breaks for couples and more public day care, the problem could be solved. “China will have 50 million more babies in ten years,” he said in the article.

When his suggestion sparked a heated discussion online, his Weibo account was suspended for “violation of relevant laws”.

Xi Jinping, the Chinese leader, has proposed similar measures in the past, but not on this scale, choosing instead to take more incremental steps to avoid drawing attention to the flaws of past policies.

More recently, Beijing has promised to reform laws banning discrimination against working mothers. The government has even banned tutoring in an effort to combat rising education costs and curb competition among parents of young children, something many couples cite as a reason they don’t want to have children.

Some of the government’s efforts ended up compounding the problem, sparking grievances and creating more anxiety around marriage and child rearing.

“More and more single women are reluctant to marry,” commented Zheng Mu, assistant professor of sociology at the National University of Singapore. “If a woman marries, her life options are more limited.”

Couples who actually marry and have children have to worry about getting access to the best teachers in the country, where education is still seen as the main path to a better life. Parents spend most of what they earn on their children’s education, including tutoring.

While authorities have banned workplace discrimination against mothers of young children, it still occurs frequently, discouraging families who need dual incomes from having more children. And while women are encouraged to be part of the workforce and told that they have equal rights with their male counterparts, cultural expectations of them, including being seen as the people who care for others in the family, have not changed.

“Women are encouraged to advance in education and careers,” said Mu. “But this shift has not been accompanied by changes in the dynamics between men and women in the family.”

The National Bureau of Statistics announced the demographic figures on Monday as part of its report on national economic growth. China’s total economic output rose 8.1% in 2021, but much of that growth took place in the first half of the year.

Ning Jizhe, director of the body, said a low birth rate had become commonplace in many countries, citing Japan and South Korea. , those born at the height of the one-child era— has dropped by approximately 3 million.

While the pandemic has delayed marriages and births “to a certain extent,” according to Ning, he has also drawn attention to the rising costs of parenting, as well as other societal factors.

Still, he expressed hope that the Chinese population would remain stable in the future, citing the government’s decision last year to allow couples to have up to three children each. “The effect of the three-child policy will manifest itself little by little,” he concluded.

This idea was challenged by He Yafu, an independent demographer from Zhanjiang, in the south of the country.

“Basically, in a country with a large population, like China, if the difference between the number of births and the number of deaths is only a few hundred thousand, that equates to zero growth,” he said in a telephone interview, warning that this trend it is irreversible.