The announcement by the ruling Communist Party represents an acknowledgment that its limits on reproduction, the world’s toughest, have jeopardized the country’s future. The labor pool is shrinking and the population is graying, threatening the industrial strategy that China has used for decades to emerge from poverty to become an economic powerhouse.
[…] “The decision makers have probably realized that the population situation is relatively severe,” said He Yafu, an independent demographer based in the southern Chinese city of Zhanjiang. “But merely opening up the policy to three children and not encouraging births as a whole, I don’t think there will be a significant increase in the fertility rate. Many people don’t want to have a second child, let alone a third child.”
[…] The party’s reluctance to abandon its right to dictate reproductive rights points to the power of such policies as tools of social control. Even as the country has struggled to raise birthrates, the authorities in the western region of Xinjiang have been forcing women of Muslim ethnic minorities, like the Uyghurs, to have fewer babies in an effort to suppress their population growth. [Source]
The policy’s central claim: to have “averted” 400m births isn’t even true. China’s fertility was falling for 10 years before the OCP, in line with other Asian nations. Instead its many cruelties distorted the pop. structure starting with the male/female ratio & 150m lone kids 2/2 pic.twitter.com/INu6hevQlw
The 3-child policy will not pull China back from its demographic cliff. Delaying retirement, expanding education & using robots may help. More attention should go to expanding inward migration, an area in which the US has a HUGE advantage over China. pic.twitter.com/vQ0VsFuKux
The government also promised a handful of “supporting measureswhich will be conducive to improving [the] country’s population structure, fulfilling the country’s strategy of actively coping with an ageing population.” From David Stanway and Tony Munroe at Reuters:
Among those measures, China will lower educational costs for families, step up tax and housing support, guarantee the legal interests of working women and clamp down on “sky-high” dowries, it said, without giving specifics. It would also look to educate young people “on marriage and love”. [Source]
officials: top reasons for young couples not willing to have more children: economic burden (75.1%), no childcare support (51.3%), motherhood penalty (34.3%)
also officials: strengthen moral education on young people's attitudes towards marriage and education pic.twitter.com/nAyLPtzIxS
Many Chinese women, it has been noted and backed up by recent demographic information, have no intention of having two children, let alone three. The most popular comment under a Weibo post announcing the policy recommended that the government protect women’s maternity rights and crackdown on workplace discrimination before encouraging them to have more children. Prominent feminist Lü Pin wrote, “I see how fearful the government is to imagine losing control of people’s sex, marriage, childbirth, and lifestyle, and also how eager it is to continue to exploit the unpaid labor of women’s reproduction and caregiving to maintain its ruling stability.” The Economist detailed Chinese society’s tepid response to the new policy:
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”.
[…] 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?” [Source]
This post says that when pigs don't have piglets in the countryside the conventional response is to find out what's wrong in the pig's environment — and to fix it. Suggesting perhaps the gov't should address other inequities. pic.twitter.com/tXXiErv7ax
— China Media Project (@cnmediaproject) May 31, 2021
#China state news agency @XHNews starts then deletes poll on its social media account asking if Chinese would be willing to have a third child after Beijing announced new 3-child policy. Over 90% chose “won’t even consider it”.🤔 Screen shot of poll below before it disappeared: pic.twitter.com/2svErNv0xo
Before she became a runner, though, she was a doctor at a hospital in Gansu. She lost her job 8 years ago when she became pregnant with her second baby, which was illegal at the time.
2/ Then there's saving for her daughter's education. She wanted to give her the best. I quickly realised she also sent her daughter to origami class (she was top) in order to add to her "CV" to qualify for a better school.
4/ A meaningful gesture by the government to put in place this new three child policy would be pointless without corresponding measures to control inflation/high prices on baby products: eg: prices of infant formula, or arrest the jiwa mindset. https://t.co/d0VfZVEguL via @QiZHAI
6/ ..family gets a cash gift of S$6000 ($4500) for each of their first two children and S$8000 for their third child. But Singapore's replacement rate is 1.14 (2019) – far below the 2.1 replacement level.
Much of the skeptical public commentary echoes that of writer Tan Yinghong’s 2015 essay on the abolition of the one-child policy and the institution of the two-child policy: “the policy hasn’t received the broad approval and enthusiastic welcome that was expected [… because] the logic of policy-making still regards the masses as a tool to satisfy the goals of the governing clique, not as people enjoying rights and equality.”
Numerous job advertisements in China specify a requirement or preference for men, or for female applicants who already have children, on the assumption that women without children are more likely to take maternity leave. An ad recently posted on the job search website 51job.com for a manager position in a clothing company in Beijing stated, “age between around 30 and 35, already have children, good looking, and good disposition.”
[…] Employers can impose various punishments on employees who become pregnant. A woman in Guangdong province was fired days after she informed her employer that she was pregnant. A company in Fujian province fired a woman on maternity leave on the grounds of “extreme operation difficulties” although it experienced no business-related losses. A company in Shandong province fined an employee 2,000 yuan (US$300) for having a second child earlier than permitted in her employment contract.
[…] “Instead of pressing women to have a second child for ‘the country’s sake,’ China’s government should fulfill its international obligations by ensuring equal treatment in employment and reproductive rights,” Wang said. “Chinese women have already endured decades of harmful interference in their personal and work lives by a government that disregards women’s rights.” [Source]
Third child speaking here! It’s not only the exclusion from social services, but also the deep, internalized social stigma of “taking up resources” and “being the burden to society.” It’s so absurd and sad. https://t.co/GiyfRCopXN
Chinese law does not explicitly prohibit single women from giving birth. But official family planning policies mention only married couples, and local officials have long provided benefits based on those provisions. Only Guangdong Province, which borders Hong Kong, allows unmarried women to apply for maternity insurance. In many places, women still face fines or other penalties for giving birth outside of marriage.
[…] With the rejection of marriage has come heightened acknowledgment of single mothers. There are no official statistics on single mothers, but a 2018 report by the state-backed All-China Women’s Federation estimated there would be at least 19.4 million single mothers in 2020. The figure included widowed and divorced women.
[…] The National Health Commission this year emphasized that family planning is the responsibility of “husbands and wives together.” In January, the commission rejected a proposal to open egg freezing to single women, citing ethical and health concerns. [Source]
While the vast majority of intrusive family planning measures have targeted women, men in search of vasectomies have also found themselves foiled by the state’s family planning measures. At The New York Times, Sui-Lee Wee and Elsie Chen profiled the obstacles single men have in obtaining vasectomies:
“If I got married and had a child, I would still belong to the bottom class,” Mr. Huang [,who had a vasectomy at 26,] said, referring to his background as a child of struggling factory workers. “When the time comes, I could also leave my child at home just like my parents. But I don’t want that.”
[…] Choosing voluntary sterilization, especially as a young unmarried man, is still seen as culturally taboo in China’s patriarchal society. In many cities, doctors require a proof of marriage certificate and a partner’s consent. (Before the procedure, the doctor asked Mr. Huang if he was married with children. He lied and said yes.)
[…] Mr. Jiang, a 29-year-old personal trainer in southern Fujian Province, said he tried to get a vasectomy in about six hospitals and was rejected by all of them. The reason: He couldn’t provide a “family planning certificate,” an official document that states a person’s marital status and number of children. [Source]
9. This is a problem for the government. As many have pointed out yesterday, it isn't enough just to lift limits on the birth policy. The govt needs to encourage births (tax cuts, subsidies, improving daycares). It has said it will announce a series of measures.
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