The population, now around 1.4 billion, is likely to drop to around half a billion by 2100—and women are being blamed.
Chinese women have had it. Their response to Beijing’s demands for more children? No.
Fed up with government harassment and wary of the sacrifices of child-rearing, many young women are putting themselves ahead of what Beijing and their families want. Their refusal has set off a crisis for the Communist Party, which desperately needs more babies to rejuvenate China’s aging population.
With the number of babies in free fall—fewer than 10 million were born in 2022, compared with around 16 million in 2012—China is headed toward a demographic collapse. China’s population, now around 1.4 billion, is likely to drop to just around half a billion by 2100, according to some projections. Women are taking the blame.
In October, Chinese Leader Xi Jinping urged the state-backed All-China Women’s Federation to “prevent and resolve risks in the women’s field,” according to an official account of the speech.
“It’s clear that he was not talking about risks faced by women but considering women as a major threat to social stability,” said Clyde Yicheng Wang, an assistant professor of politics at Washington and Lee University who studies Chinese government propaganda.
The State Council, China’s top government body, didn’t respond to questions about Beijing’s population policies.
China's problem is a universal problem. They're "communist" in name only. Their economy has capitalist demands for growth/metastasis, same as ours and most developed economies.
People want to have kids when they can expect those kids to live at minimum the same quality, and preferably better quality, than they themselves did and do. That just isn't the case anymore as the global economy has run out of massive new sectors for growth/metastasis and has begun eating itself. You can see this in all the entire sectors here merging into monopolies and duopolies. Constant merging isn't a business strategy, it's just trying to buy time in a failing economic model.
Capitalism has always been a long-term pyramid scheme to concentrate all the power/wealth/means/capital to a small owner class. The problem is, the con has run out of new places and ways to exploit people as you eventually can't squeeze more out of a fully exploited stone. No pensions, laughable pay, no future. Just expected to thanklessly generate capital for the owners in larger and larger quantities for the love of what? The nation trying to commoditize your entire life to profit the right people? Why would you bring another poor, desperate child to suffer such a world?
Now, in their desperation, these economies that lead their societies and governments around by the nose are desperately screaming "MORE LIVESTOCK TO EXPLOIT GOD DAMN IT!" because in lieu of not being able to squeeze any harder on existing capital batteries without being correctly told to 'get fucked,' that's all they have.
I firmly believe that is why the federalist society that runs our SCOTUS is trying to get abortion banned, as the most profitable capital batteries are desperate, poor ones. I also believe the intentional decline of our public education system is meant to address the same problem, if they can make the population stoooopid enough not to consider the lives the children of already struggling peasants would have.
This world is finite. Its resources finite. An economic model literally based on infinite continuous growth/metastasis or die is not compatible with the world as it is. In every sense, it is killing us, whether by climate change from without, and loss of actual personal meaning within, at least for the non-winning vast majority. The goal of global economics should have been to establish a sustainable population that could find equilibrium/homeostasis with our shared, COMMUNal environment we all rely on from one breath to the next. Not a lot of room for Super Yachts and private jets in such a world though...
This is why so many ‘industrialists’ are championing Mars bases and asteroid mining. Not because it would solve scarcity, but because it would provide another spatial fix, which like you said, is the ideal capitalist solution.
There was a 1950s radio drama show called X-Minus One that adapted stories from a science fiction magazine. There's a comedic one that is a surprising critique of capitalism in 1950s America called "Snowball Effect" [spoilers ahead] about an economics professor who comes up with a formula for unlimited growth and tests it out on a small women's organization in a small town in Wisconsin. It starts working too rapidly, but he has built a flaw into the formula where the organization will quickly collapse if they stop getting new members. But it becomes so successful that the organization takes over the world. At the end of the episode, the world leader (who started as the president of the organization in the tiny Wisconsin town) announces that they are landing the first people on Mars to look for Martians because they desperately needed new members.
Humanity divorced itself from nature long before capitalism existed. Without natural bounds on growth, any organism will multiply indefinitely. Every technology we've developed, from stone tools and fire to transistors and fractal antennas, has been in service of removing natural bounds. After the world wars, people were concerned about our ability to feed an exploding population, then the green revolution happened. Today, we're grappling with how to feed 3 to 4 times as many people, as well our depletion of other natural resources and the effect we're having on the planet as a whole. We're developing fusion, solar & wind, carbon sequestration, desalination, vertical farming & hydroponics, and the asteroid mining and extraterrestrial colonization you mention.
It's scary now because it feels like we're truly on the brink of destroying ourselves - outgrowing our planet's ability to host us in multiple different ways - without a nascent technology close at hand to save us from ourselves again. We're smart, but are we smart enough to defeat nature entirely? Either we stay one step ahead of perpetual growth, or we finally realize that perpetual growth is the one natural thing about ourselves that we have not managed to truly grapple with.
Exactly I don't understand how building an economy on screwing over each other is viable.. It is present in everything as corporations are running out of metrics to gain income we are seeing either lower quality products on the market, shrinking quantity of consumables or everything becoming subscriber based at ever increasing prices as everything is commodified.. If you stop producing you just die.
This despite having 2/3 of the countries GDP in SOEs and 60-90% of the workforce in SOEs, having 5 year plans, and political leadership primarily under a Communist party. Why do so many people think communism is only when everyone makes the same paycheck or when the economy is managed bureaucratically?
Governments and companies have gotten by in the past with a combination of factors:
Religion pressuring people into marrying and having children.
Poverty and poor education causing people to have children they weren’t prepared for. Includes lack of access to birth control and discouraging its use.
One income households made it feasible to raise large families when times were good. The rich have since siphoned off all economic growth while real wages have stagnated.
Having children is an unpaid job. If the government wants people to have children, it should start paying for it. Or, the wealthy will need to stop hoarding all the wealth and let regular people earn enough to support a family on one income again.
In the meantime, people should feel justified and good about not reproducing. The planet is already pushed to its breaking point. More humans will consume more resources and emit more CO2.
You’re basically expected to produce new workers all at your own expense. And, who benefits? The children you raise become workers and contributors to the economy. So, it’s the capitalists that benefit from increased productivity and growth.
I realize there are other abstract and noble reasons to have children. But, capitalists don’t see it in those terms and there is this economic dimension to childrearing. You should be able to have children if you want them, but you should also be paid for doing so to the extent that it benefits society. I would argue that people were once paid, albeit indirectly through a spouse’s salary that was high enough to support a non-salaried adult to raise the children. Why are people now expected to both work and raise children? Why are they expected to fit this productive activity into their non-working hours as if raising children was a hobby.
In Russia, people with children get benefits that scale really quickly with the number of kids you have. This is, of course, balanced by the fact that Russia is miserable and people seldom wish to stay.
How much whiny shit I have seen on the internet over the years about the child income tax credit. Oh yes that tiny reduction that comes no where near the actual cost of raising a child. I can't see people who bitch and moan about this voting for even more money. Then you got the other side that cries about having to pay for schools.
Sorry I can't see any situation where we roll out something like this. We are way too short thinking and "fuck you I got mine". Which is fine since global warming is going to kill us one day and we will deserve it.
It feels so backwards, I see people admonishing the younger, more liberal generations for not having children while turning around and bragging that their wife only needed two weeks of maternity leave. Why want more children in the world if you dont want to actually take care of them?
I think the issue could be distilled down to the fact that women globally have been forced due to economic factors to choose the workplace over the home. It's a good idea for women to have equal rights in the workplace, and they should be able to choose a career over a family. But basically, every economy shifted to the point where now you need two average salaries to support a household. This means keeping one parent home to watch the kids is financial suicide for most families.
The results are fewer children, dumber children, and a shittier society. Tax incentives for having kids are a start, but not nearly enough to tip the scales at all.
It sure looks like "the economy" is this massive religious monster that demands nonstop sacrifices for its endless growth. Not immediate sacrifices, mind you, but long and torturous ones. It managed to get a lot of people in line for the sacrifice, it only forgot that pesky part about ensuring they reproduce before dying.
I have several very close friends who are Chinese. Some from near Shanghai some from near Beijing. The reason they explain is much more cultural and not capitalist as some here suggest.
For one, it is extremely rough on women because young men act very spoiled and men in general have an abusive problem there. So they don’t want to have kids with these men and they don’t want to marry them either. Women are getting married much later with it not being completely unheard of to be 30 and unmarried anymore in China.
Second, it is also hard on women because of family. When they get married the man’s family is their new family essentially and they lose support from their blood family. This can be tough especially if the husbands family hates the woman (not that rare).
Third, divorce is still rare because of the culture of stick through it and be a good wife. Divorce is also hard when you have kids and there’s a lot of pressure to have kids right away when you get married. This is changing but it’s slow.
Finally, we arrive at feminism. This is a good change and women are realizing all the cultural problems and see they can be happier on their own and make big money on their own too. So why get married, why have kids when you can be happy by yourself?
So all in all it’s not bad changes, these are cultural changes most countries go through and I’m happy for the Chinese women and hope all goes well. If you have any questions or want me to elaborate just let me know.
Considering your first point, it might be more effective to train young men in how to be attractive husbands and co-parents than to pressure women to just lay back and think of China.
The capitalism part is culture too. You're just describing the traditional capitalist practices of treating women like commodities to use as a type of fuckable home appliance. You're using cultural language to describe commodity trade, inheritance, reproduction of human capital, property ownership, and the fact that only men were "real people" who could own capital.
Put women in the workforce but keep the societal expectation of having them do all the housework, child rearing, cooking, cleaning, etc.
Gee I wonder why they don’t want to engage in that social contract anymore, and that doesn’t even cover how fucking expensive it is to even have one kid
I'd imagine a lot of people who were affected negatively by 1 child policy being absolutely pissed at seeing the government suddenly go "we miscalculated, pls start breeding like rabbits"
Well there aren't enough women because men are obsessed with family lines. Having one child. A male child was the preference, and in China older women are undesirable so I can see why there is a problem.
Wrong? I see people deciding not to have kids as fundamentally a good thing. Coercion into having kids due to government pressure or social norms seems a whole lot more wrong to me. It's ok to not want kids, it's not some sort of disorder that needs fixing.
I would absolutely love to see the population go down, even for like a single day, within my lifetime. But considering we've added over 2 billion people to the population since I was a kid...I don't have high hopes.
Coercion into having kids due to government pressure or social norms seems a whole lot more wrong to me.
as someone who does not want kids and is constantly being pressured into it by inlaws, thank you for saying this. Every time i see my screaming, trantrum throwing nephews my belief is more reinforced.
Yes, I think the person you replied to meant exactly what you put in words- they just left it vague to accommodate for all the other factors involved not only in the Chinese case at hand, but worldwide. I don't think they meant to say it's not ok to not want to have kids.
Better for the environment for sure, but less people would leave many countries bankrupt because of high senior care costs. I mean, they could just allow immigration, but that’s not gonna happen. It’s funny how the US benefits so much from immigration and yet half the country doesn’t want it
Humanity has always taken an idea and ran with it to the breaking point and beyond, having it fall apart, take the pieces that worked and cobble together a few new idea to run with usually accompanied with a new batch of religions and cultures. But living in that falling apart time isn't the greatest experience.
There is also the fact that the economy is collapsing in on itself since companies are pulling out of China in droves. It is a toxic business environment, ever since Trump's presidency has ignited this whole nationalism tend among world politics things have been going downhill for younger generations it is like being a US citizen, and graduating in 2008
Imagine graduating with a degree, and there are no jobs available.
Yeah, it's really no wonder many are choosing not to have kids these days. It's insanely expensive and inconvenient and governments do very little to make it financially attractive. At least in the US.
Why would anyone want kids while they can't afford anything with no kids? If they want people to have kids, they better help them financially. You can't have a child and leave them for strangers to raise them at daycares. Or have the mother sit home and the dad works 3 jobs to put food on the table. Fuck that.
And it shouldn't be that way. A human being doesn't need to work 3 jobs to just fucking survive. I have worked 3 jobs and it sucked. I went months without seeing my son while he is awake, I left home while he was asleep and came back while he's asleep. It was brutal.
I hate to do this, but I feel like Taiwan(numba 1) is doing this better than China(numba 4).
The Taiwan government is literally giving money to have kids. The more kids you have, the more monthly cash they give you. I think our president said something along the lines of "it's up to our country to take care of all children of Taiwan". I'm paraphrasing.
Not just cash, we also have infrastructure setup. Most malls, government buildings and public places have breastfeeding rooms. There is almost always a bathroom designated for people with children. There are even bathrooms set up with small tiny toilets. There is a designated area for kids to sit on the train. There are designated elevators for kids.
Plus healthcare is free/cheap so that helps.
If China wants more babies, it needs to start giving the people things that promote having kids. Unless you force them to have kids.... I guess because you can. Fuck the CCP.
The Taiwan government is literally giving money to have kids. The more kids you have, the more monthly cash they give you.
South Korea has a similar strategy, although I think it comes as housing benefit and paid time-off.
The problem is that these economic incentives are relatively small. And they all come with the caveat that you have to... get married and take up a subservient role in child care and produce babies (the last bit in particular being extremely unpleasant and not something you can easily pay people to do).
By contrast, private employment in the professional sector offers a significantly better deal. Get more money than the miserly state stipend. Keep your independence. Don't tear your vagina in half producing a new baby. Enjoy your fucking life in an economy that is built to produce luxury consumerist experiences.
If China wants more babies, it needs to start giving the people things that promote having kids.
The article is paywalled, so its hard to say exactly what Chinese social policy isn't doing. But the country worked very hard to curb its population towards sustainability and to improve the outlaying regions of the country that was shedding peasant farmers in droves. Compare the population distribution of China to neighboring Japan, where a full 12% of the population lives in the capital city. Tapei is nearly as bad.
At some point, people are responding entirely to social pressures. I'm not going to try and have kids if I'm living in a closet on a peasant wage. Neither are folks in Europe or North America. We're all in the same boat in this regard. Post-industrial countries are all seeing a population shortfall, in no small part because they've compressed populations into these tiny spaces and given them barely enough to live on.
Add in the cultural shaming of "teen pregnancy" and what you're left with is asking a bunch of career-professional thirty-somethings to get off the career elevator so they can fuck like horny adolescents.
Taiwan has paid time off for mothers(not dad's). Usually a month or so. There are no housing benefits in Taiwan that I know of. The incentive is def a small portion of how much a child costs, but it's not a little. I get like 8000nt a month directly deposited into my account. I also get schooling incentives. It is basically free cash that pays around 25% of my child's schooling/daycare.
China has a brutal 996 culture if you're lucky to even have a job. Nobody is going to start making babies when a VERY large % of your young population is unemployed.
China’s population, now around 1.4 billion, is likely to drop to just around half a billion by 2100, according to some projections. Women are taking the blame.
Estimating the fuck-rate of my grandchildren's grandchildren and being very concerned in a paper that can't predict the next quarterly financial cycle correctly.
If there's one thing I know about the Chinese Communist Party, it's that they take rejection and defiance in stride. At least this isn't anything as dangerous as hunger strikes and students assembling in public squares so maybe they can save a little gas money on tanks and pressure washers this time around.
I've seen a bunch of comments expressing interest in the population declining. Since I don't really want the Thanos approach, lowering the birth rate is great.
I propose sterilization for cash, like cash for clunkers. You get a bunch of free money if you decide you want fixed.
Think of the amount of people who'd take that deal. Long term, lower population, less social program spending, hopefully less people's wanting abortions, win win. It goes against the rich people need for more workers, but you can dangle the lower welfare receipts, they'll be all about that. 😋
Sorry, morbid humor among actual socioeconomic conversation.
I honestly feel we need to set a limit to human lifespan. Healthcare is advancing too fast for this to be sustainable.
Bro, you lived 75 years, please die already so new generations can have some resources for themselves, stop hogging everything, you... hogger. Lower the retirement age to 55 and let people enjoy their last 20 years with decent retirement money because there's less old people to maintain.
This is the only solution I can think of. If the population keeps growing at this rate and we don't start culling ourselves, we'll make the planet inhabitable.
Young people are necessary for the economy to bloom and to sustain old people after retirement. I don't think sterilization is an option.
No one wants to die at 75 - that's a single decade (in old age, mind you, with limited options) to enjoy retirement. IF you managed to retire. There's a lot of older people now that I work with that simply can't retire, because they can't afford it. That's only going to get worse as we grow old and need to retire.
We can't enact Logan's Run at 75 and assume it'll fix anything. We'll all work till we drop, which I don't want for my children. Hell, my parents don't want that for me now!
Increase education rates, reduce poverty, and give women more rights = fertility goes down. This is a good thing in theory, but society has to change its approach to designing the economy to handle a declining population.
China probably wants to make more military reserves so they can have more manpower to invade Taiwan in the future after seeing their friend ruZZia flopped in Ukraine.
Its crazy to me that countries are urging women to have children. At least they should do what Christians and Muslims do and brain wash women to have children.
Oh look, it's the same fucking problem of every fucking rich country! The "find out" part after the "fuck around" of living conditions getting ridiculously expensive, plus expecting both parents to magically have time and energy to work AND care for their child