How China lost the plot on population
In the end, not the CPC's policies but Chinese couples — women specifically — will decide whether to have more children or not
On September 25, 1980, the Communist Party of China (CPC) released a document, titled “Open Letter to members of the Chinese Communist Party and the Communist Youth League”, advocating the “one-child per couple” policy. The letter, rapidly dispatched across the country through the party’s grassroots apparatus, bore the stamp of the CPC’s top decision-making body.
It is widely believed to be the first central document to unequivocally direct Chinese citizens — muscled by human surveillance and harsh penalties — to follow the State-decreed birth control policy.
Chinese officials have claimed the one-child policy implemented for three decades and more prevented over 400 million births, which advocates say, in turn, relieved pressures on community resources and the environment. “The policy also lightened pressure on peoples’ livelihood, on education, on job hunting and on medical care, and in turn has saved the nation and families the resources that would have had to be expended on education,” an academic paper published in the Asian Journal of Social Science said, also arguing that women benefitted from the policy with a reduction in childbearing frequency and maternal morbidity.
A new official count of births and deaths recorded in 2023 and released on January 17, however, revealed how that policy — despite being withdrawn in 2015-16 — has edged the country towards an irreversible demographic crisis.
The data released by China’s National Bureau of Statistics showed that China’s population dropped by 2.08 million, or 0.15%, to 1.409 billion last year. Chinese couples are reluctant to have babies, the data showed, reinforcing the bleak forecast that the country will grow old before it gets wealthy.
It was a stark reminder of how the country, under the hard and authoritarian rule of the CPC, brought this demographic disaster on itself through the one-child policy. It is now clear that even if the policy worked in the first decade or so, it should have been eased much before it was finally done. The one-child policy was strictly implemented between 1980 and 2015 with exceptions for couples in rural areas and among minorities.
It took China another six years — in 2021 — to further relax its family planning policy, allowing couples to have three children: For the majority of Chinese couples, it was the first time that they were legally allowed to do so.
The secretive ruling party was aware for years that a downturn in population was around the bend but did little to check the slide until the middle of the last decade. The revised Population and Family Planning Law passed in 2021 allowing Chinese couples to have three children was an attempt to address the reluctance of Chinese couples to have more children due to mounting costs, especially on education.
Under the revised law, China has implemented measures, across provinces and in cities, in sectors like finance, tax, insurance, education, housing and employment, to reduce families’ burdens as well as the cost of raising and educating children.
“According to the decision, by 2025, China will basically establish a policy system that actively supports births with better services and lower costs in childbearing, care and education. The gender ratio of new-borns will be more balanced and the population structure will be improved,” China’s official Xinhua news agency said in a report on the revised law in 2021. “How many children an individual has will no longer be a reference when he or she registers for a household account, enrols in school, and applies for a job,” the Xinhua report said, quoting the official document.
The change in policy — and the expected results — clearly hasn’t kicked in the way it was meant to have. Chinese experts are now suggesting further refining of existing population policies. He Dan, director of China Population and Development Research Centre, told Chinese state media that there’s a need for a “systematic policy reshape”, an “all-round” adjustment to “…improve birth rates, such as reducing living expenses, alleviating educational anxiety and promoting female employment”.
Given the grim outlook, for 2024, Chinese authorities are looking at a mythical intervention to bump up childbirth: The fascination among the Chinese to have children in the Year of the Dragon, which is what this year is under the local zodiac. There’s some empirical evidence to suggest a spike in childbirth during dragon years but that’s unlikely to have a big impact on the trend of decline in 2024.
In the end, or, actually, at the beginning, not policies but couples — women specifically — will decide whether to have more children or not. It’s entirely unlikely that an official letter stamped by the CPC’s top leadership — and circulated on Weibo and WeChat — exhorting Chinese citizens to have more children will work any miracles.
The views expressed are personal
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