Only 38% of Chinese college students want to EVER have children. 34% among women. Guessing at true desires of “uncertain” respondents, average Chinese college women desires just 0.94 kids. College men 1.05.
(“Fertility Intentions, Parenting Attitudes, and Fear of Childbirth among College”)
Chinese pronatalism will fail.
The only paths forward for China are either:
- Cope– very very hard given China’s constellation of finance, local government, welfare, and migration policies
- Coerce– BIG YIKES, but they may try it
- Convince– they aren’t even trying this yet
It’ll be interesting to see if China attempts any big “cultural interventions” aimed at shifting desired family size and the social prestige attendant on parenthood and large families. So far they haven’t even gestured in that direction.
China’s whole shift so far has been
- rolling back prior punitive antinatalism
- assuming voluntary incentives will unleash higher desired fertility like in Western countries
But Chinese people genuinely don’t want big families in most surveys!Recent surveys of Chinese fertility preferences give estimates between 0.9 and 1.7– these are the lowest surveyed preferences found anywhere in the world folks. The kind of pronatalism I espouse is DOA in the Chinese context.
I have said as much in the South China Morning Post, and the ongoing failure of China’s pronatal turn over the last 3-4 years since that article has only affirmed the arguments I made there.
China in fact is very worrying to me. The government clearly wants more babies. They have a track record of coercion. They have extremely strong motivations to try to hit this lever. Immigration isn’t a viable option– China is too darn big, language is hard, and the govt opposes.
So China is the kind of place where my worries about a Decree 770-style policy really get traction, and it is in China where I believe the emerging Western view that having a policy or even talking about a policy is Very Bad will lead to inhumane outcomes. By ceding the entire policy debate and removing Western liberal voices from the conversation about how to raise birth rates, Western experts are leaving the space of “recommendations for China” increasingly composed of “Romania, Romania, and Romania”.
For those of us who
- really dearly love the Chinese people and cherish Chinese culture and therefore
- react in horror at the idea of those policies being imposed on people we love, it is very frustrating to watch Western liberal experts wash their hands of the debate.
Baby vats+++(=??-)+++ could address the tokophobia issue, which surveys like the one I link suggest are a very real issue, especially in Asia. In the fall I will be surveying tokophobia in the US. I have no idea what I will find.
But… At the end of the day the reason Chinese people don’t want kids is because raising kids in China really really sucks. It’s not fun and Chinese childhood (really east Asian childhood!) is increasingly an experience young Asians don’t want to recreate.
Will China try to just do state-sponsored baby-farms?
Maybe. That’s…. what Romania kinda did but in a low-tech way. Many scholars believe the result was that those orphans grew up hating the regime, and launched a revolution. I think China is sensible to that worry. They are also still resisting easing up on nonmarital fertility in any major way, so I’m skeptical they’ll jump straight to orphan-factories.