(TibetanReview.net, Oct29’24) –As China unveiled on Oct 28 new birth support policy measures to promote the building of a birth-friendly society, its grass roots government workers, who had spent decades imposing strict birth control policies, ruining careers and families, are now calling up women in their neighbourhoods to urge them to get pregnant amid the country’s demographic crisis, reported China’s official Xinhua news agency and the scmp.com Oct 28.
A directive from the General Office of China’s State Council (the cabinet) details 13 targeted measures on enhancing childbirth support services, expanding child-care systems, strengthening support in education, housing and employment, and fostering a birth-friendly social atmosphere, said the Xinhua report.
The measures are designed for actively building a “new marriage and childbearing culture”, noted Reuters Oct 28.
Tens of thousands of Chinese women of childbearing age are now being pursued through a vigorous campaign organised by vast district administrative networks. Grass-roots government workers have been mobilised to contact women in their neighbourhoods to urge them to get pregnant, said the scmp.com report.
The central government also hopes to learn why so many women are reluctant to have more children, and devise new policy options as a plummeting birth rate steers the country towards a demographic crisis, the report said.
A nationwide survey announced Oct 17 by China’s Population and Development Research Centre sought to “obtain new data on views on marriage and fertility and key influencing factors”.
A Sample Survey on Population and Family Development in China, approved by the National Bureau of Statistics on Oct 11 targeted women of child-bearing age – defined by the bureau as women aged between 15 and 49 – from about 30,000 families, covering 1,500 communities or villages across 150 counties.
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Their responses showed strong grievance and anger against the country’s past draconian one-child policy and antipathy towards marrying or having children in the post-Deng Xiaoping reform era of today.
Huang, a 35-year-old working mother of one son who lives in the southeast coastal province of Fujian, has said an overly enthusiastic social worker even asked about the timing of her most recent period and offered to give her a reminder call when it was “the right time” to conceive another baby.
She has cut short the government effort by telling the social worker that she had no immediate plans for a second child, that “I have no money, no time and no energy for a second baby.”
Huang’s sentiment was “very common”, the scmp.com report cited district level officials from three coastal provinces as saying, speaking on condition of anonymity.
They have said many respondents had vented “strong grievances” about the country’s recent past one-child policy as well as considerable worries about the economy and employment.
One official from Fujian, surnamed Lin, who was involved in the survey, has said many who had been fined by the government for breaching the previously strictly enforced birth control rule wanted the authorities to refund the penalties imposed on families.
China scrapped its decades-old draconian birth control policies in 2021, when Beijing raised the limit of children per family to three, and stopped imposing fines on families who exceed the quota.
Previously, couples who had more children than allowed were required by the local birth control department to pay “social maintenance fees”, to have the child legally registered in the household.
In 2020, one couple in Guangzhou were fined nearly 320,000 yuan (US$44,870) for having a third child, the report said, citing mainland media reports.
Women of child-bearing in China are now being targeted by joint efforts of the “civil affairs, education, police, health, statistics, medical insurance, social security departments,” who seek to “understand how many women in our district are of child-bearing age, their intentions to have more children, their physical condition and the family’s financial condition.”
Some districts even offered women who intend to have more children in the near future free folic acid supplements, to help reduce the chance of birth defects, a Guangdong district official surnamed Chen has said.
According to the China Population and Development Research Centre, in 2022, China’s fertility rate dropped to 1.09, while the total fertility rate in Shanghai, one of China’s wealthiest cities, dipped to 0.6 in 2023, according to the municipality, the report noted.
A replacement fertility rate of 2.1 children per woman is widely accepted as the necessary rate for a country’s population to remain constant.
If China’s fertility rate remains on its downward trajectory, for every child born in the future, six people will die – a trend that threatens to intensify the nation’s demographic crisis, the report was stated to have warned.