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By Micah McCartney
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China's rollout of measures to boost its flagging birth rate remains patchy and inconsistent, a team of researchers has found.
Why It Matters
About two-thirds of the world’s population now lives in regions where the total fertility rate (TFR) is below the 2.1 births per woman needed to sustain a population naturally. China’s rate is among the world’s lowest—hovering near 1.0—and last year, deaths outnumbered births for the third consecutive year, despite a raft of policies introduced to encourage larger families.
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The demographic shift is expected to have major consequences in the coming decades, including a shrinking workforce, lower productivity, and a growing strain on social safety nets as fewer workers support a rapidly expanding population of retirees.
Newsweek reached out to the Chinese National Health Commission via email for comment.
What To Know
Chinese Communist Party authorities have been slow to implement “major structural changes” needed to scale back restrictive fertility policies in line with the country’s plunging TFR, according to the authors of a recent RAND Corporation report.
“This may be due to the unwieldy bureaucracy undergirding government actions, the CCP’s reluctance to admit past wrongs and adopt new policy approaches,” the authors wrote.
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Since ending the decades-long One-Child Policy in 2016 and rolling out Two-Child and, in 2021, Three-Child policies, there is a “growing gap” between central government goals and implementation at the local level, the report found. Wealthier cities can offer more substantial and innovative pro-natal benefits, while less affluent regions lag behind.
Most programs are still restricted to families with local household registration, leaving migrant workers and other mobile groups with little access. This “highly uneven” rollout has resulted in a patchwork of local policies and fragmented administrative capacity, the report found.
There’s a rising trend toward fewer and later births in China, especially among college-educated women. Citing Chinese academic research, the report notes that financial and time pressures, especially the cost and burden of child care, are major factors contributing to families’ hesitance. The authors suggest that focusing more resources on easing housing and other economic barriers could help slow the impact of China’s aging population, even if the fertility rate does not recover to replacement levels.
What People Are Saying
The authors write: "China’s fertility decline reflects unmet fertility intentions, not a lack of desire to have children. Pronatalist policy misses the mark by targeting norms and administrative reforms rather than enabling those intentions by addressing social or economic constraints."
What Happens Next
As for China's heavy investments in labor-saving technologies such as artificial intelligence, the authors said it’s too early to tell whether this will meaningfully address the country’s demographic challenges.
“Overall, we assess that technological investments will produce uneven effects across varied populations. For example, only resource-rich senior care institutions can leverage the most advanced AI-enabled technologies,” they wrote.
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