China's one-child policy leads to declining birth rate

[Compiled and published by New Sancai] According to the Wall Street Journal, China’s long-term policy of restricting most families from having one child has led to a rapid decline in China’s birth rate in the past two years.

China officially ended the policy in 2016, allowing families to have up to two children and later three, but just a few years later the birth rate still fell for the first time in decades, from 7.52 million in 2021 dropped to 6.77 million in 2022.

Peng Xiujian, a senior researcher at Australia's Victoria University who mainly studies China's population economics, told the Wall Street Journal that in terms of birth rates, "Our forecasts for 2022 and 2023 are already low, but the actual situation is worse."

The number of births in China fell by 500,000 in 2023, which officials attributed to a decline in the number of women of childbearing age, about 3 million fewer than the previous year, and "changes in people's attitudes."

Susan Greenhalgh, an anthropologist at Harvard University who has written about the one-child policy, told the Wall Street Journal that the idea came from a Chinese missile scientist named Song Jian who was in his 40s. worked with mathematicians many years ago to create a model to calculate the impact of fertility rates on China's population and determined that rapid population growth would harm the country's hopes of economic success and modernization.

"He persuades people with a dire narrative of an impending demographic, economic, and ecological crisis," Greenhalgh said.

She noted that modern young Chinese women "will not accept returning to the household as housewives," while other researchers noted that Song's model failed to account for China's rural-to-urban migration over the years as those urban areas expanded.

"Overpopulation has been a major problem in China for many years. It is difficult to convince the government and the public that China will face rapid population decline and aging," said Zuo Xuejin, a retired demographer and president of the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences.

Nonetheless, the birth rate, which has been declining for several consecutive years, does sound a warning for China’s demographic future.

(Compiled by: Wang Jimin)

(Editor: Jiang Qiming)

(Source of the article: Compiled and published by New Sancai)