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China has stepped up a nationwide campaign to persuade singles to marry and have children as Beijing grapples with an increasingly severe demographic crisis.
Local governments are cold-calling married women to ask about their plans to have children and are handing out money to parents to encourage them to have more than one child.
Universities have been asked to introduce so-called love courses for single students and regular articles appear in state media about the benefits of having children.
China's population is shrinking, with deaths outstripping births, piling pressure on local governments to address an increasingly bleak demographic outlook.
“China's population faces three major trends: aging, low birth rates and low marriage rates,” noted economist Ren Zeping said in an interview with the local press last month. “There are fewer children and more elderly people. The speed and rate of China's aging is unprecedented.”
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Beijing has pledged to offer greater subsidies and tax breaks to parents to lower the cost of raising children. The State Council, China's cabinet, said in October it was drawing up a plan to build a “birth-friendly society” as part of a wider stimulus package to tackle an ailing economy. The details of this plan are still being hammered out.
Meanwhile, married women in their 20s and early 30s across the country have received calls from local officials asking about their plans to start a family, according to multiple people who spoke to the Financial Times and the Post. on social media.
In some cases, callers asked women to participate in prenatal body checks. Other callers were more direct, offering subsidies to women who had more than one child. Couples must have an average of 2.1 children to reach the population replacement rate.
A Zhejiang resident, who declined to be named, said officials offered local women a subsidy of 100,000 Rmb ($14,000) to have a second child. “There's no clear policy, but if you ask, the village will find a way to get you the subsidy,” she said. Currently, subsidies for children are determined by local governments depending on their fiscal health.
The personalized lobbying comes against the backdrop of an intensified media campaign touting the benefits of childbearing. In recent months, the state-run People's Daily and Life Times have promoted scientific claims that childbearing is good for the mother's health and can even help prevent cancer and treat some diseases.
A state publication by the National Health Commission in December called on universities to create “marriage and love education courses” to encourage students to pair up.
“Universities are an important place for college students to fall in love,” he wrote, citing a survey that found 57 percent of students said they didn't want to get into a relationship because of their heavy workloads.
The article proposed that universities introduce courses on the theory of love and the analysis of real-life cases to promote a “systematic knowledge of love and marriage.”
However, experts are skeptical that official measures to boost the birth rate will persuade young people to start families, especially as rising unemployment and weak economic growth have curbed spending.
Wang Feng, an expert on Chinese demography at the University of California, Irvine, said officials are using the same “playbook of using administrative power to achieve demographic goals” that was evident during the one-child policy era, 35 years from 1980. when families were limited to having one child.
While Beijing has successfully banned couples from having large families, it is more difficult to use administrative powers to achieve the opposite result, he said. “Such old wine in a new bottle will not be effective, as the rationale underlying late marriage and low fertility are completely different.”
Shen Yang, a feminist writer, said people could “see through the propaganda”.
“If the government wants to boost the birth rate, it needs to create a more parent-friendly environment, especially for single mothers,” she said.
While Beijing is encouraging births, there are no signs that it has limited access to birth control or abortions. Although there may be specific cases of doctors refusing to perform procedures, these often reflect concern about legal action by family members, said a gynecologist in Beijing.
However, Wang said the authorities had an uphill battle to convince “young women and men today, who belong to the most educated generation in Chinese history” to have children.
“Especially for young women, they not only face high living costs but also severe career penalties when they leave their job to have children.”
