Please use the sharing tools found via the share button at the top or side of articles. Copying articles to share with others is a breach of FT.com T&Cs and Copyright Policy. Email licensing@ft.com to buy additional rights. Subscribers may share up to 10 or 20 articles per month using the gift article service. More information can be found here.
https://www.ft.com/content/b576db8d-d912-4a59-ba9f-33c5104f329d
Two decades ago, the International Wages for Housework Campaign called for a “Global Women’s Strike”. “We do the work of giving birth to, feeding & caring for all the people in the world,” the campaign declared. “But this work is devalued & demeaned.” Women from 64 countries joined the day of action, but notably none from China. In a country where feminist actions have been shut down by arrests, Chinese women are not generally protesting on the streets. Instead they are quietly quitting in their homes. This week, the government announced that China’s population has started to decline for the first time in 60 years. Historically, the slowdown in fertility can be linked to the punitive one-child policy enforced from the 1980s, which the government only ended in 2015. Demographers say that the slowdown would have happened anyway, without the brutality and forced abortions of the policy, due to urbanisation and increases in income. The best explanation for the falling birth rate is the simplest: like women the world over, Chinese women are no longer so willing to birth and bring up children.
Please use the sharing tools found via the share button at the top or side of articles. Copying articles to share with others is a breach of FT.com T&Cs and Copyright Policy. Email licensing@ft.com to buy additional rights. Subscribers may share up to 10 or 20 articles per month using the gift article service. More information can be found here.
https://www.ft.com/content/b576db8d-d912-4a59-ba9f-33c5104f329d
“From buying a house to getting married, from prenatal education to extracurriculars, from primary to secondary school, from university to employment, from helping them get married to helping them raise kids, every step makes the spirit weary,” writes Tsinghua University sociologist Sun Liping. In other words, the choice to desist from having more children is a rational response to the emotional and material costs of raising them. The government crackdown on private education companies in 2021 was partly a recognition of these sky-high costs — except it treated the symptom, rather than the cause. The fear of losing out in a polarised labour market drives intense competition for scarce educational resources among parents. Low fertility is a problem for an economic model that relied on mass labour to fuel low-cost manufacturing. But China’s government says it is past this point. Instead, it wants “high-quality growth”.