Zane Li was nine years old when she won a sister – and her arrival plunged her family, who lived in a small town in eastern China in a devastating debt.
Under the rigorous politics of the only child in force at the time, Li’s parents were fined 100,000 yuans (about $ 75,000) for having a second child – almost triple of the annual income obtained by the family with the sale of fish in the local market.
“We could barely survive,” Li recalled. At the time, he was just a third year of high school who was forced to mature overnight, assuming most of the housework and helping his mother in the bank during school holidays.
Now 25, Li says she has no plans to have children – an increasingly common stance in her generation. The trend worries the Chinese government, which tries to avoid a population crisis that he himself created.
Declining birth rate
For decades, authorities have pressured couples to have fewer children through heavy fines, forced miscarriages and sterilization, but now begging LI generation that has more babies.
Last week, amid the effort to increase birth rates, China announced that it will offer parents one of 3,600 yuans (R $ 2,700) for each child until the age of three, with retroactive effect from January 1.
“The cost of raising a child is huge, and 3,600 yuans a year is a drop in the ocean,” Li said, who made a student loan to attend a master’s degree in health services in Beijing.
Raising a child up to 18 costs an average of 538,000 yuans in China, more than 6 times GDP per capita – making the country one of the most expensive places in the world to have children, according to a recent study by the Yuwa Population Research Institute, based in Beijing.
In Shanghai, the cost exceeds 1 million yuans, with Beijing behind with 936,000 yuans.
“(Having children) would only bring more difficulties. I’m not a capitalist or anything, and my son probably wouldn’t have a very good life either,” Li said, who is anxious about his employment prospects and contemplates doing a doctorate.
This dark perspective on future paternity – fueled by China’s economic slowdown and growing unemployment among young people – presents a major obstacle to the government’s campaign for young people to marry and have children.
Faced with a declining workforce and a rapidly aging population, China abolished its only child policy in 2016, allowing couples to have two children, and then three in 2021.
But birth rates continued to fall. A three consecutive years, despite a modest recovery in birth last year, and experts now warn of an even more pronounced decline.
FINES TO AID
The new national aid for children’s care is a significant step in China’s Pro-Natality campaign.
For years, local authorities have experienced a number of incentives-from tax benefits, housing advantages and cash payments to extended maternity leave.
Now, the central government is taking the initiative with a standardized national program, allocating 90 billion yuans (R $ 68 billion) in aids that are expected to benefit 20 million families this year.
“It’s no longer just a local experiment. It’s a sign that the government sees the crisis as urgent and national,” said Emma Zang, a demographer and professor of sociology at Yale University.
“The message is clear: we are not just telling you to have babies, we are finally putting some money on the table,” Zang added.
The new scheme, which also offers partial aid for children under the age of three before 2025, was well received by eligible parents, but Zang said it is unlikely to change the fertility rate.
Similar policies failed largely to increase births in other Asian societies, such as Japan and South Korea, Yale teacher said.
For many young Chinese who deal with inaccessible housing prices, long working hours, and a precarious job market, help does not relieve its reluctance to start a family.
“It’s not just about cost. Many young adults are skeptical about the future, such as job security, parents aging and social pressure. So a cash payment doesn’t address the emotional tiredness that people are currently facing,” Zang said.
System of firstborn men in rural areas
The change between fine parents for unauthorized births and offering benefits for more children does not go unnoticed by Millennials and China Generation – especially those who personally witness the harsh penalties of the only child policy.
On Chinese social networks, some users posted photos of old receipts showing the fines their parents paid for giving birth to them or their brothers. Among them is Gao, who grew up in the remote mountains of Guizhou and asked to be identified only by the surname.
The southwest province is one of the poorest in China and was among the many areas that received an exception to the policy of the only child, allowing rural couples to have a second child if the firstborn were a girl – a concession to the traditional preference of the country by children.
Like his two older sisters, Gao was sent to live with his grandmother shortly after his birth to hide from family planning employees, allowing his parents to continue trying to have a boy. They had four daughters before they finally had a child.
Now living in the eastern province of Jiangsu, Gao, 27, says he has no interest in marriage or raising children.
“Knowing that I cannot provide a child with a good environment for education and life, choosing having no children is also an act of kindness,” she said. “I definitely don’t want my son to grow up like me … No chance of social mobility and fighting the lower layers of society.”
Lack of optimism
For decades, while China’s economy grew and the standard of living improved, generations of young people have matured with the belief that they would have a better life than their parents.
Today, many young people created with the promise of social mobility through hard work and education are disillusioning: real estate prices have fired, and a university diploma no longer guarantees a good job – as family connections guarantee busy vacancies and opportunities.
There is a growing feeling that its tireless effort only produces tiny returns in an increasingly competitive society – a trend summarized by the popular expression “involution”, a term borrowed from sociology to describe a self -destructive spiral of excessive competition.
In response, many are choosing not to follow the expectations of society, including marriage and children.
June 29, 29, grew up in a middle class family in Haidian district in Beijing.
Home of 3 million people and many of the main universities in the country, Haidian is famous for his super competitive approach to children. Zhao began attending private classes every weekend in the third grade – and it was a few years late compared to his colleagues.
After completing his graduation and postgraduate degree abroad, Zhao returned to Beijing to work with investor relations. She says that the immense pressure she grew up with – and she still feels – played an important role in her decision not to have children.
“The cost is simply very high and the return very low,” she said. “In general, I have a very pessimistic view of life – I investigates so much, but I received very little in return.”
Zhao considers herself lucky – her work rarely requires many overtime. Even so, she has difficulty imagining finding time to raise a child. After moving and dinner, she has only two or three hours of free time a day before going to sleep.
It would be even harder for your friends trapped in the Chinese routine “996”, which predicts 12 hours of work per day, usually from 9am to 9pm, six days a week, she added.
Like other young people of the same age, Gao is simply not optimistic about the life he could provide to a child, or the society in which he would be born. “You just feel like having children when you believe the days to come will be good,” she said.
There is also the longtime gender imbalance in the child rearing, along with the physical and emotional wear and tear it causes in women. In Zhao’s case, it was his mother who had to reconcile full-time work and help her with her homework, or take her to private lessons.
“I saw first hand how hard it was for my mother to raise me. I know for sure that women carry a burden and a much higher cost than men when it comes to raising a family,” she said.
As the fertility rate falls, the ruler communist party has emphasized women’s domestic role as a “virtuous wife and good mother”-promoting it as a precious part of traditional Chinese culture and essential for the “healthy growth of the next generation.” Employees have asked women to establish a “correct view of marriage, birth and family.”
Zang, the demographer, said it is simply unrealistic to expect women to have more children without approaching the royal barriers they face.
“You can’t go back in time and expect women simply embrace more traditional roles. Today’s young women are highly educated, career -oriented and want more equality.”
“Unless policies support this reality through measures such as paternity leave, workplace protection and flexible jobs, fertility rates will not recover,” she said
“The government wants more babies, but society is not structured to support families,” he added. “At the moment, having children looks like a trap, especially for women. Until that changes, aid will not be enough.”
