November 21, 2023, scene of overcrowding at Beijing Children's Hospital.(Video screenshot)
People News– CCP official media Xinhua News Agency reported on Monday (October 28) that the CCP State Council has introduced various measures to strengthen policies supporting childbirth, aiming to create a birth-friendly social atmosphere. This includes strengthening support services for childbirth and childcare, enhancing support measures for education, housing, and employment, and actively building a new culture of marriage and childbirth.
Xinhua stated that the CCP General Office of the State Council recently issued the "Several Measures to Accelerate the Improvement of the Birth Support Policy System to Promote the Construction of a Birth-Friendly Society," which calls for perfecting the birth support policy system and incentive mechanisms, improving a population service system that covers all populations and life stages, effectively reducing the costs of childbirth, childcare, and education, and fostering a societal atmosphere that respects and supports childbirth. This aims to provide strong support for achieving moderate birth levels and promoting high-quality population development.
According to Voice of America, this is the CCP authorities' latest attempt to reverse the continuously declining birth rate and even population decline. Data from the CCP National Bureau of Statistics shows that by the end of 2022, China's population was 1.41 billion, a decrease of 850,000 compared to the previous year, marking China's first negative population growth since the 1960s famine.
By the end of 2023, China's total population was 1.40967 billion, a decrease of 2.08 million year-over-year. That year, 9.02 million people were born in China, with a birth rate of 6.39‰, both reaching the lowest levels since the CCP established its rule in 1949. After ending the strict and sometimes brutal "one-child policy" after 35 years in 2016, China saw 17.86 million newborns.
Meanwhile, India surpassed China to become the world's most populous country.
Reuters cited Zhongtai Securities Research Institute's chief policy analyst, Yang Chang, who commented, "Supporting birth at this stage is of great significance."
Yang stated that the authorities' announcement on Monday will serve as a template for future measures. He said that with the number of women of childbearing age (15-49) expected to decrease and the desire to have children unlikely to rise quickly, policy support is crucial for helping reverse the declining birth rate trend.
Earlier, on October 17, the China Population and Development Research Center under the National Health Commission announced that after more than a year of preparation, the sampling survey system and plan for China’s population and family development status had received official approval from the National Bureau of Statistics on October 11. The survey aims to understand factors influencing public attitudes toward childbirth and to analyze reasons for the reluctance to have children, ultimately providing empirical evidence to strengthen birth support policies.
The center stated that this survey would include 150 counties and 1,500 communities (villages and residential areas) in China, targeting 30,000 people. "The survey will focus on the main factors affecting the public's willingness to have children and reproductive behavior, and understand the actual difficulties and needs of families regarding childbirth and parenting."
The center said that through this survey, it will "comprehensively analyze the reasons behind the unwillingness and hesitation to have children, providing scientific basis for improving birth support policies and incentives, effectively addressing public concerns, and promoting effective implementation of birth policies."
The CCP authorities often link population development with the so-called "Great Rejuvenation of the Chinese Nation" proposed by Xi Jinping.
Population expert Yi Fuxian believes that the CCP's long-standing family planning policies have led to a shrinking labor force ratio and population aging, which have severely distorted China’s population structure. He believes the CCP faces three major challenges in encouraging childbirth: first, psychologically, the unwillingness to have children; second, materially, the inability to afford raising children; and third, biologically, the inability to conceive.
The Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) stated earlier this year that the continuous decline in China’s newborns is due to the COVID-19 pandemic and that the birth rate may rebound in 2024 due to pent-up demand. However, this rebound will likely last only until 2025, after which newborn numbers are expected to decline as the number of women of childbearing age decreases.
Since the 1960s, China’s family planning policies became increasingly restrictive, culminating in the implementation of the one-child policy in 1980, making it one of the most radical modern population management policies, leaving lasting negative effects on China's population structure, exacerbating population aging, and leading to an increasingly severe male-female imbalance. Many regions in China harshly enforced the one-child policy, forcing women who became pregnant outside of the plan to have abortions, leading to widespread international criticism.
In November 2013, the CCP authorities announced a partial relaxation of the policy, allowing couples where one partner was an only child to have two children. Surprisingly, despite over 11 million couples meeting the criteria to have a second child under the new regulations, as of August 2015, only 1.69 million applications were submitted, representing 15.4% of eligible couples.
In October 2015, the authorities announced that from 2016, all couples could have two children, marking the end of the 35-year-long one-child policy.
A 2016 study in Studies in Family Planning suggested that this policy change was at least ten years too late. The delay was largely because continuous population control became a source of political legitimacy for bureaucrats, and the public had been brainwashed with a “Malthusian fear” of unlimited population growth, erroneously believing that most of the country's social and economic problems were due to population growth.
The study concluded that although the one-child policy had limited impact on reducing China’s population growth, it created tens of millions of single-child families over its 35 years. In 2016, China had about 150 million single-child families, of which around 100 million were the result of the one-child policy. For these families, the damage caused by the policy is long-term and irreparable.
As China’s labor-age population ratio to the elderly continues to decline, population aging poses not only a severe burden on Chinese society but also causes anxiety among many only children reaching working age. Additionally, China’s newborn sex ratio has been heavily skewed for 30 years, mainly due to gender-selective abortion and female infanticide, resulting in an estimated 20 to 40 million “surplus men” in 2016.
The one-child policy was evidently not voluntary. To enforce this policy, the CCP conducted mass sterilization and abortion campaigns. In 1983 alone, there were about 21 million births, 14.4 million abortions, and 20.7 million sterilizations (mainly of women). In addition, 17.8 million intrauterine device insertions were performed that year, most of which were non-consensual.
However, the lukewarm response from young couples to the partial relaxation of the policy largely confirmed the findings of a pioneering study conducted in Jiangsu from 2007 to 2009, which indicated that China's current low fertility rate is more a result of voluntary choice rather than policy restrictions.
The study pointed out that in other East Asian regions such as Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, pro-birth and pro-family policies have also failed to increase low fertility rates. Thus, the end of the one-child policy in China is unlikely to significantly increase birth rates.
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