FOR A GENERATION, China’s government had persuaded its married couples that “one child is enough”. Then, in 2016, it allowed parents to give birth to a second. Now they may at last have a third. On May 31st, at a meeting of the ruling Politburo led by Xi Jinping, the country’s most senior officials decreed that a further relaxation of birth-control regulations would help China to fulfil its goal of “actively coping with an ageing population”.
Fresh in their minds are the results of the latest once-a-decade census, which were released on May 11th. They made plain a deepening demographic predicament: only 12m babies were born last year in China, a drop of almost 20% from 2019 and the country’s lowest population growth since the 1960s, when it was reeling from a widespread famine.
No indication was given of when the three-child policy would take effect. But reactions to the announcement on social media hardly brimmed with enthusiasm. “Do they not yet know that most young people are exhausted just supporting themselves?” commented one netizen on Weibo, a Twitter-like site. “This policy is totally out of touch with the people,” wrote another. An online poll by Xinhua, a state news agency which broke the news, asked if people would consider having three children. Just 5% of respondents said they would. Most others said “not at all”. At least 31,000 took part in the survey before it was hastily taken down. Netizens devised a new interpretation of a common idiom, minbuliaosheng, which means “the people have no means of livelihood”. They repurposed it to mean “not even speak of giving birth”.
There are still reasons to cheer. The new policy is a blessing for those parents who wish to have a third child without fear of a large fine or, in the case of civil servants, being dismissed from their jobs. Women in some areas of the country were still being put under pressure—illegally—by zealous local officials to undergo abortions or sterilisations. Most notably, it is a signal from the leadership that China is “moving very decisively to a pro-fertility policy”, says James Liang of Peking University. Mr Liang predicts that the government will “very soon” do away with birth quotas altogether.
Why not discard them now? At 1.3 children per woman, China’s total fertility rate is already among the world’s lowest. It is also well below the 2.1 necessary to keep a population from falling over time. Officials have made clear their fears that economic growth will fall with it. In 2012, after expanding for 50 years, China’s labour pool began to shrink. Officials expect the total population to peak in the next few years, almost a decade sooner than some government advisers had predicted. The Politburo says babymaking will be encouraged, such as by providing subsidies, better child-care facilities, expanding maternity benefits and lowering the cost of education. It promised to “protect the rights of women in employment”.
There is little evidence that birth-control policies are holding couples back. When China loosened its one-child policy six years ago, the government hoped for a baby boom. But after a brief initial uptick, births continued to fall (see chart 1). Mr Liang estimates that the three-child policy will boost the current fertility rate by a tepid 10% or less.
Many parents had grown used to decades of one-child rhetoric. They often feel—in cities as well as in villages—that a family’s resources are best devoted to one child, to ensure she has opportunities that her parents did not. As more women pursue careers, many are delaying marriage and having babies. The high cost of housing and education, as well as the crushingly long work hours common in many companies, deter young couples from having any more than one child, or reproducing at all.
Yet the Politburo said the two-child policy had “achieved positive results”. The Communist Party still struggles to admit that its birth-control policies have been ill-conceived. From the 1970s, most of China’s decline in fertility was caused by urbanisation, education campaigns and women’s greater participation in the workforce—the same forces that caused declines in other developing countries that had no brutally enforced birth quotas (see chart 2). China has also ended up with at least 30m more men than women because of sex-selective abortions and even infanticide to which some desperate parents resorted under the one-child policy.
To abolish caps would be tantamount to acknowledging failure. “It’s like steering an oil tanker,” says Stuart Gieten-Bastel of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. Allowing couples to have as many children as they like would make redundant a nationwide family-planning apparatus that employs tens of thousands of bureaucrats.
The government cannot let go. It says that “education and guidance” of young people must be “strengthened” on matters relating to marriage and having children. Many are fed up with such attempts. Some netizens noted that the official poster for the three-child policy featured two girls and a boy: a hint, some were sure, that having more girls in the mix was seen as desirable given the imbalance in the sex ratio. Many female netizens noticed a cruel irony. “We women are feeling so frustrated at the moment,” commented one. “Are we now just seen as mere babymaking machines?”
By The Economist
