He Ying*, 32, lives with her husband and 5-year-old daughter, affectionately nicknamed Dou Dou (“little bean” in Chinese), in a suburban flat in Ningbo, a coastal city on the outskirts of Shanghai.
Lamenting the pressures of being a mother in modern China, she rattles out the bills she must pay every month: an endless list of utilities and extracurriculars among other expenses. When asked about the newly-introduced three-child policy, she balks: “One child’s a handful, much less three?”
He’s story represents the archetypal middle-class urban family in China, which has swelled from a mere 3% of the population in 2000 to over half in 2018. By the end of 2030, this number will grow by approximately 45%, and the story of these young city dwellers is very much that of China’s future. China’s hopes in boosting its fertility rate rest on its young families, but with the immense socioeconomic pressures they face in modern China, young couples are choosing not to expand their brood, much to the dismay of central planners in Beijing.
A Look At China’s One-Child Policy
For more than three decades, China, the world’s most populous country, was under a blanket one-child policy. Authorities mandated that families were only permitted to have one child to counter overpopulation and raise standards of living. Any more would be deemed “socially irresponsible,” and those who flouted the law faced harsh penalties, including stiff fines and even forced abortions.
In the past decade, however, Beijing has swiftly switched course, gradually loosening the caps on the number of children, from two children in 2016 to the recently introduced three-child policy barely five years later. The change comes just as China’s birth rate fell to another historic low at just 12 million newborns in 2020, a drop of almost 20 percent from the year prior. This drastic turnaround is a clear signal of the urgency of China’s future population crisis, a trend which Beijing’s central government is eager to reverse.
What demographers call the “low-fertility trap” — which asserts that populations with a total fertility rate below 1.5 births per woman will face difficulty reversing population decline — has caused increasing concern among the political elite for a while now: China’s TFR stands at just 1.3. By 2050, assuming fertility trends remain the same, China’s elderly dependents will make up close to one-third of its entire population while its labor force contracts by a whopping 23%.
Most of China’s East Asian contemporaries — Japan, South Korea, Singapore, among others — expect similar population declines, but the restrictiveness of China’s one-child policy has drawn a much sharper curve than the rest. Instead of a silver wave, China expects a tsunami.
As a result, China risks teetering off a precipice in its population pyramid: The after-effects of the one-child policy have created a massive population imbalance that has placed extreme pressure on its generation. As young Chinese of this generation, now in their twenties and thirties, start to settle down and set up their families, they must contend with the weighty pressures of the 4-2-1 structure. It is this structure that describes the vast majority of Chinese families: a working adult with 6 elderly dependents — a pair of parents, along with 2 pairs of grandparents.
Things are further complicated when you consider the alarming gender asymmetry as a result of the OCP. There are 118 males to every 100 females in China, a steep deviation from the global average of 105 to 100. Gender stereotypes which traditionally favor boys over girls, “zhong nan qing nü” (重男轻女), are to blame. When only one child could be legally recognized, parents often resorted to great lengths to secure a son, even if it meant forsaking a daughter in the process. This has resulted in a staggering 30 million more men than women; for many Chinese bachelors, even finding a partner is widely considered to be an uphill battle, much less starting a family.
China’s introduction of the three-child policy is a welcome move that indicates the gradual easing of control over reproductive planning. Still, it has done little to encourage young couples to expand their families. Earlier in May, state-affiliated media outlet Xinhua posted a poll on popular social media platform Weibo asking netizens if they “were ready” for the policy change. Nearly 30,000 replied that they were not considering it at all, while only a thousand or so indicated otherwise. The poll was deleted soon after.
The introduction of the three-child policy is still wrought with issues, and it exposes the lack of structural provisions and support that would enable families to have more children if they so desire.
The Spectre of Chinese Gender Roles
Gender equality may be enshrined in the Chinese Constitution, but these rules do not apply at home. Women are expected to fulfill concurrent responsibilities as caregivers and full-time workers. Although the booming domestic labour market has given working women some reprieve from taking over such household responsibilities, it is ultimately the mother’s responsibility to ensure that these expectations are met, with or without assistance. Few of these standards are expected of working fathers.
The three-child policy signals a turn towards more freedom in family choice. However, the patriarchal forces that shape population policy have been hard to shake off. In a precursor to the two-child policy, families were exempted from the restrictions of the one-child policy if their first child was a girl, allowing them to try again, preferably for a son. This law acknowledged an overwhelming preference for sons in Chinese society and codifying it did more to reinforce this bias than fix its effects.
As New York Times correspondent Vivian Wang pointed out in a conversation with the HPR, the irony here is that the one-child policy enabled a generation of highly-educated, well-heeled women that, as sole progenitors of their families, were given equal attention and resources as their male counterparts. Thus, asking them to revert to traditional gender norms in a push for larger families only serves as a greater deterrence for choosing to have more children.
For this wave of empowered women, more children translate into greater expectations and lesser freedoms.
Supporting the Chinese Mother
For the past three years, He Ying has taken a step back from her career as a marketing executive to care for Dou Dou full time, a decision that she candidly shares her anguish about. There were simply too few preschool options around to take care of Dou Dou, and her barely mobile parents could not step in for her.
After returning from maternity leave, she found it difficult to reintegrate back into her workplace, further spurring her departure from work. Many of her colleagues had moved far ahead: in the world of marketing, where trends change from one day to the next, one cannot afford to skip a beat.
China’s announcement of the upcoming policy change was accompanied by promises of a slew of ‘supporting measures’ aimed to provide better childcare support and greater protections for working mothers, although these details remain vague. These promises could be an important step forward, but they are also an implicit acknowledgment that the lack of a safety net for young families has been a major hurdle in enabling family growth.
In Chinese society, child-rearing is seen as strictly the domain of the family, a realm that the state should have little to no interference. As a result, childcare is often a multigenerational effort, where sets of grandparents or older relatives take on the role of a babysitter when both parents are working. Where these arrangements cannot be met, the burden of childcare often falls on mothers; the dearth of state support for childcare until very recently is clear evidence of this.
Additionally, working mothers are not sufficiently supported in their workplaces. On paper, this does not seem to be the case. At the federal level, expectant mothers have up to 98 days of maternity leave, which is further extended by a minimum of 30 days on a provincial level, although this varies from state to state. There are also nominal legal protections in place which prohibit employers from any explicit gender or pregnancy-based discrimination.
The problem has not so much been the laws themselves, but the enforcement of them. A thread on popular social media site Zhihu, China’s answer to Quora, details the collective experiences of women who have faced discrimination by their employers, both current and prospective. In one such post, a woman recounts how her employer asked her to sign a binding agreement that she would not give birth in the next two years. Another post laments the negative perceptions that corporate headhunters have about women: Women without children are considered more likely to take multiple maternity leaves in the future. At the same time, women with children are too busy juggling childcare commitments to work. Either way, women are passed over and marginalized in corporate culture.
Let’s Talk About Money
Months before Dou Dou’s scheduled enrollment into Primary One, China’s equivalent of first grade, He Ying’s chats are filled with anxious parents in shoes like hers. One-child families like He’s concentrate the majority of their financial resources — even across generations — to secure the best for their young ones. Even with a hukou (户口), or residency permit, Dou Dou is not guaranteed a spot at her nearby primary school. He Ying’s phone buzzes nonstop, and she starts to feel the heat as the date looms.
“I’m worried that even if we give all that we have, it won’t be enough. There’s just another family with more money that might beat my Dou Dou out”.
Perhaps the most critical concern about raising a child in China is mastering the delicate balancing act of finances. When the hopes and aspirations of parents and grandparents are pinned on just one child, competition between families is rife, where those who are well-off can easily edge out those who aren’t. In the low-income residential districts of Shanghai, families spend over 70% of their incomes on their child alone, not to mention the financial pressures that young families face in supporting their aging parents.
A Chinese adage goes, “among a hundred virtues, filial piety comes first.” The notion that children have a duty to care for their parents in old age, both financially and emotionally, persists in modern Chinese society. The state has little, if not any, responsibility in ensuring such needs are met. These expectations are becoming all too overwhelming for some young adults, leaving family planning out of the picture.
With Dou Dou relatively settled into the routine of elementary school, He Ying has tried to rejoin the workforce to supplement her husband’s modest income. Yet, the problem of childcare still persists: her day involves shuttling Dou Dou back and forth from enrichment centers — abacus, English, violin — before reaching home with just enough time to spare for a late dinner before resting in for the night. “Without which, it’s hard for Dou Dou to compete with her other classmates: there’s always one who can multiply faster than her in class.”
Beijing has sought to address these pressures by cracking down on the $120 billion private tutoring industry and potentially implementing trial bans on vacation tutoring, among other restrictions. That has been a welcome addition in reducing the often exhausting financial costs that this system has placed on young families. But the indirect mechanisms by which the system operates proves that these solutions are still insufficient in addressing the structural limitations that prevent young couples, particularly mothers, from having more children.
Looking Deeper
For policies as intimate as population planning to achieve sustained success, it isn’t as simple as introducing protective measures or incentives. These policies require a remodeling of what an ideal Chinese family looks like in the future and a greater balance in the distribution of expectations on both parents. Telling people to have fewer children is much easier than telling them to have more.
This comes on two fronts: one, a greater emphasis on paternal involvement in domestic affairs; two, the relationship between family and state.
Midway through our interview, He Ying’s husband, Albert, pops up in our video call. “He just got home; his boss requires him to work 996,” referring to a common phrase that describes how most Chinese employees are required to work from 9 AM to 9 PM, 6 days a week. With much of the debate focused on the length of maternity leave protections, the father’s role in the family is often overlooked — China’s 14 days of paid parental leave pale in comparison to the 14 weeks it gives to Chinese mothers. In addition to further extensions, China should consider allowing either parent to transfer their leave entitlements over to the other parent once they are ready to rejoin the workforce, as is practised in select Scandinavian countries. This flexibility has come in handy in cases when mothers are incapacitated and unable to care for their children after childbirth. Such solutions require great coordination between state agencies and individual employers, with state planners more invested in maintaining and increasing productivity with an impending labour shortage.
For them to be feasible, there needs to be a greater societal awakening: it takes a village, with both parents fully engaged, to raise a child. In an interview with the HPR, Professor Mu Zheng of the National University of Singapore observes, “children should not be seen as the property of their parents, but rather the key to progress for an entire society.” As this narrative shifts, so will state interventions and support mechanisms for child-rearing.
He Ying shies away from brunches with her old university classmates or her colleagues. Childcare responsibilities, such as picking up Dou Dou from school, are the reasons she gives for her absences. She opens up about avoiding comparisons with a life she could have otherwise lived: “The female friends that chose not to have children seem to be much better off than me, and it does make me think how things would have been without Dou Dou.”
She says this wistfully but does not skip a beat when asked if she would do it all over again. “I’d never regret having Dou Dou, she’s truly been a blessing for me.”
“But I’m happy with Dou Dou. One is more than enough for me.”
*He Ying is a pseudonym to protect the interviewee’s privacy.
Image Credit: Image by Rui Xu is licensed under Unsplash License
