China’s births hit historic low, a political problem for Beijing

The falling birthrate, coupled with the increased life expectancy that has accompanied China’s economic transformation over the last four decades, means the number of people of working age, relative to the growing number of people too old to work, has continued to decline.

None have been able to reverse a stark fact: An increasing number of Chinese women don’t want children. “The year 2021 will go down in Chinese history as the year that China last saw population growth in its long history,” said Dr Wang Feng, a professor of sociology at the University of California, Irvine, adding that the 2021 birthrate was lower than the most pessimistic estimates.

Because the “one child” rule was a pillar of Communist Party policy for decades, questions about its consequences have become politically fraught. When a prominent economist wrote last week that the way to solve China’s declining birthrate was to print trillions of bank notes, he was promptly censored online.

More recently, Beijing has promised to revamp laws prohibiting discrimination against working mothers. It even banned private tutoring in an effort to tackle soaring education costs and rein in competitiveness among young parents — something that couples often cite as a reason for not wanting to have children.

Although officials have made it illegal to discriminate against young mothers in the workplace, it still happens regularly, discouraging families who need dual income from having more children. And while women are encouraged to go into the work force and told they are equal to their male colleagues, cultural expectations in which they are viewed as caretakers have not changed.

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