YOU wouldn’t think the release of a new stamp would cause much
excitement, regardless of the situation. But the latest commemorative
new year offering from the Chinese government has got people talking.
Why? Because the happy family of pigs shown on the stamp includes three children.
Social media users have been speculating that the stamps are a subtle
signal from the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) that there could soon be a
change to the restrictive two-child policy.
The stamp commotion follows a Bloomberg report from
May that found the State Council had plans to scrap population controls
completely and were looking into the likely impacts of a nationwide
reversal.
An end to the four-decade-old policy would remove a major source of
international criticism. And the leadership hopes it will also slow down
the country’s rapid pace of aging.
While it will certainly achieve the first objective, whether it will lead to a baby boom is far from certain.
China has changed dramatically since 1979 when the one-child policy was
first implemented. In today’s more affluent, more educated society,
Chinese people are showing little sign of wanting kids.
The CCP first changed its restricted birth policy in 2015. Suffering one of the lowest fertility rates in
the world and a diminishing working-age population, the leadership
scrapped the one-child system in favour of a still-strict two-child
approach.
Billboard advocating birth control part of Chinese government “one-child
policy” in Heifei in the Anhui province, October 11, 1986. Designated a
“temporary measure,” China’s one child policy was established by
Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping in 1979 to limit communist China’s
population growth. Source: Michel Hermann/AFP
The following year, once the change had taken effect, China did indeed see a baby boom with an 11.5 percent increase
from the previous year. A total of 18.46 million live births took place
in 2016, nearly half of whom had an older sibling.
The leadership hoped that the new policy would bring three million additional births a year by 2020 and add more than 30 million workers to the shrinking labour force by 2050.
But the frantic procreating didn’t last. The birth rate fell by 3.5
percent the following year, suggesting the one-child policy may not have
been the only thing standing in the way of Chinese families growing.
Despite having every opportunity to marry – given China’s surplus of 30
million men – it seems women just aren’t that interested. In
particular, urban, educated women, just the demographic the CCP wants to produce the next generation.
Women are increasingly delaying marriage and pregnancy,
despite government discouraging conceiving past the age of 29. Instead,
they are turning their focus to work and refusing to settle for the
unfair cultural norm of being burdened with childcare and caring for
elderly family members.
In a 2017 survey of
more than 40,000 working women by Zhaopin, one of China’s largest
online recruitment websites, about 40 percent of respondents said they
did not want to have any children, and nearly 63 percent of working
mothers with one child said they did not want to have a second.
The main reasons given were the expense of raising a child, lack of time and energy, and concerns over career development.
The declining marriage rates also mean people are less likely to have children.
Across the country, 3 million couples registered their marriages with the Ministry of Civil Affairs (as reported by SCMP) in the first quarter of 2018, down from nearly 4.3 million in the same period of 2013 – a substantial decline of 30 percent.
Couples kissing each other during a mass wedding ceremony at
Northeastern University in Shenyang in China’s northeastern Liaoning
province. May 20, 2018. Source: AFP
The government has actively worked to discourage unmarried women having
children, imposing fines and restricting access to social welfare if
they do fall pregnant.
But all are not created equal in the eyes of the CCP and, while they
have been firing pro-baby propaganda campaigns at educated Han women,
ethnic minorities in the rural areas still face restrictions.
The predominantly-Muslim Uighur community in the northwestern region of Xinjiang face coercion to stop their high birth rates.
But urban women have a new found autonomy that shows no signs of
reversing as people grow more affluent and China’s middle class
continues to boom.
China’s middle class is on fire. According to a study by consulting firm McKinsey & Company, 76 percent of China’s urban population will be considered middle class by 2022.
Given the shift in mentality, removing the two-child policy will likely
prove an ineffectual means of promoting the government’s
population-growth agenda. But it will finally put an end to one of the
biggest social experiments in human history.
