Women’s choice could be main obstacle to China’s three-child policy

When China introduced its one-child policy in the autumn of 1980, the country was in the midst of an economic revolution.

Its policymakers believed they had to shift a rural economy ploughed by millions of China’s sons and daughters into a better-fed and better-educated population in the cities.

Haunted by the famine that killed tens of millions between 1959 and 1961, the party wanted to curb the growth of the world’s largest population — just shy of 1 billion in 1980 — to ease the demand on resources.

Over more than three decades, the world’s largest social experiment would force mothers and fathers to hide their extra children or be fined or fired. It would lead to more than 336 million abortions, many of them girls.

Now China has 30 million more men than women and a demographic crisis of its own invention.

The generations that preceded the one-child policy are growing old. China’s population grew from 540 million in 1949 to 940 million in 1976. Retirement pensions are due and so are the hospital bills. There’s a smaller proportion of workers to pay for them and fewer women to give birth to the next generation of taxpayers.

China’s top decision-making body, the Politburo, announced on Monday it would raise the number of children allowed per family from its current limit of two to three. It took the step knowing that the two-child policy introduced in 2016 hasn’t had an impact. The fertility rate has remained at 1.3 for five years, well below the replacement rate needed to stop the population shrinking.

The one-child experiment transformed China. Big rural families have become small ones dedicated to the success of a single child.

A 2016 survey by the government-controlled All-China Women’s Federation found only 21 per cent of women said they would like to have a second child.

The cost of living, particularly in Beijing and Shanghai, has surged. House prices jumped by 30 per cent in both cities between 2015 and 2017.

In Yanjiao, a small town on the eastern fringes of Beijing, 36-year-old mother Sharon Piao said she would not consider a second child, let alone a third, after quitting her job to care for her baby.

“The cost of just having a child is too high, not to mention the cost of raising it. We had to pay tens of thousands of yuan for all kinds of health checks, hospitalisation and maternity care,” she said on Thursday.

Her husband has not had steady work recently. “A second child might mean poverty to us. Also, I hope to provide the best to my baby, but with a second, the cost has to be shared,” Piao said.

“I’m an outgoing person and love to go out and meet people. But with a baby around, I feel like living in a prison and don’t have time to do what I’d like to.”

Lu Pin, a Chinese feminist who now lives in the US, said urban Chinese families had invested in the education of their only-child daughters — with unintended results.

“Many young women are consciously choosing not to have children. Not having children is a consequence of women’s empowerment.”

Yi Fuxian, a senior scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison whose book Big Country with an Empty Nest was banned from China, said he estimated the policy would only generate an extra 100,000 to 200,000 births per year.

“It is not enough,” he said. “Everything in the economy is based on one child. There is not enough room to house more children.”

A poll by state broadcaster Xinhua on Monday was taken down by state censors after almost 29,000 out of 31,000 respondents said they had absolutely no intention of having three children.

“I don’t buy a Rolls Royce not because they limit the number of Rolls Royces I can buy,” said one netizen on Weibo. “I want to sell my quota to rich people.”

Another said: “I myself am a product of the one-child policy. I already have to take care of my parents. Where would I find the energy to raise more than two kids?”

Lu said the policy was “doomed to be ineffective”, judging by the anger expressed on social media by Chinese women.

“It is foreseeable that the new policy will have a more serious negative impact on women’s employment, that is, more employers will be reluctant to hire women due to the ‘worry’ about women’s future birth plans,” she said.

Yaqiu Wang had spent months researching the impact of the two-child policy on women’s employment for Human Rights Watch. Her findings were released on Tuesday, a day after Beijing’s sudden three-child announcement lit up Chinese news bulletins.

“[For employers, it means] women could take more maternity leave and they could possibly have more children to take care of at home,” she said. “It’s not just affecting woman who chose to have a second child or third child, it affects all women in the workplace.”

Chinese job noticeboards already advertise for men or women who already have children and won’t want any more.

One civil service ad in Fujian province said there was “no restriction on males or females” but added: “Females must be unmarried, or married with children, [schedule] won’t interfere with night shifts, age between 18-35.”

Another at an insurance company was more specific: “No restriction on men or women [but applicants] married without children will be rejected.”

Those who are hired have been made to sign contracts vowing not to get pregnant or agreeing to consult the company before conceiving. Women who breach these obligations can be fined or fired.

When Liu Yiran, a 34-year-old woman working for an internet company in Beijing, told her boss in May 2017 that she was pregnant, it took less than three months for a new hire to take up her responsibilities. Then the company stopped paying her salary.

A Chinese state media editorial by Yuan Xin, a professor at the Institute of Population and Development at Nankai University, acknowledged the day after the three-child policy was released that it had its pitfalls.

He said the government should extend public subsidies for childcare and aged care, ensure women weren’t discriminated against in the workplace and provide tax breaks to would-be parents.

“The three-child policy is aimed at improving the country’s demographic structure,” he said. “However, that is possible only if the new family planning policy is accompanied by supporting measures.”

Other cultural factors may be harder to shift. China’s three decades of the one-child policy entrenched an already emerging phenomenon. Fertility had fallen from six children per couple in the mid-1960s to fewer than three in 1980.

The shift from farms to the cities meant that fewer hands were needed to produce crops, so families had fewer children. The same trends were evident in other developing countries. Researchers Charles Hirschman, JooEan Tan and Aphichat Chamratrithirong found that the fertility rate in Thailand decreased from 5.6 in 1970 to 2.1 in 1990 without family planning policies.

Wang said the government was still worried about too many births in regional areas and really wanted “high-quality children from parents in urban areas, but these are the most reluctant to have children”.

“Its a scary way of valuing human life,” she said.

Wang Feng, a professor of sociology at the University of California, said families now focused their spending and energies on one child.

“Many of them belonging to this generation are highly educated and they can really engage in this new economy very productively,” he told German broadcaster Deutsche Welle in 2018.

But he said that the policy would ultimately leave China’s surging economy facing tremendous challenges.

“By implementing the one-child policy, China reaped the short-term gains, but by draining the pond, it ensured that there would no longer be fish,” he said.

Many of those born in the first two decades have now had their own only children and have become the legendary “tiger mothers”, pressuring their offspring to become high-achievers.

Their children are raised as “bullfrogs”, all-rounders whose schedules are crammed with martial arts, languages and music, so that not a second of their lives is idle.

The money flowing into these industries tells the story. The value of before- and after-school tutoring services in China is forecast to grow from $155 billion in 2019 to $200 billion by 2025, market researcher Qianzhan found. Music education is expected to jump to more than $80 billion by 2022.

Capital Economics senior China economist Julian Evans Pritchard said it was largely economic and social trends, rather than family planning policy, that were behind the decline in China’s fertility rate in recent decades.

“With small family sizes now well ingrained into the fabric of Chinese society, there is little that policymakers can do to turn back the clock,” he said.

So why limit families at all?

Carl Minzner, an expert on Chinese law at Fordham University’s law school, suggested removing limits would restrict the Communist Party’s ability to control the reproductive choices of Chinese minorities, particularly Muslims in Xinjiang, Tibetans or Mongolians.

“Remove all restrictions, and Beijing’s efforts targeting those groups become harder to justify,” he wrote on Twitter.

“I could [also] imagine the visual impact of a celebrity or Party cadre with, say, five children detonating a huge number of latent social tensions in Chinese society among ordinary citizens who are struggling to raise one child or who were barred from having a second just years ago.”

Yi said the three-child policy reveals an insecurity. “It shows the Chinese Communist Party does not have enough power to stop its stupid policy,” he said.

Human Rights Watch director Sophie Richardson said a decade ago, a two-child policy was considered impossible.

“But also 10 years ago, we thought crimes against humanity wouldn’t be committed by the Chinese government,” she said.

“I think one of the darker commentaries on social media over the weekend, was not just about whether people would participate in this or not, but concerns about whether the state might start requiring people to have children.”

The Politburo said on Monday that it was looking at incentives for families to have more children but there are ominous precedents for the interference of the Chinese state in reproductive rights.

In 1991, at the height of the one-child policy, authorities in Guan and Shen counties in Shandong province launched the “Childless Hundred Days” campaign.

Between May and August of that year, all pregnancies in the two counties were forcibly aborted.

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