Families have been around for a while, and people don’t need to be especially advised to start families and have kids.
Unless, that is, a government for decades ordered its people to minimize the number of kids they produce and imposed sterilizations and abortions to enforce these orders to combat what it regarded as the problem of too many people. But has now decided to reverse course to combat the problem of too few people.
Per Reuters, October 31, 2023:
Chinese President Xi Jinping said women have a critical role and must establish a “new trend of family,” as the nation grapples with an aging population and record decline in the birth rate.
In comments published Monday by Xinhua, China’s state-run state news agency, Xi said the role of women had been part of a discussion with the new leadership team of the All China Women’s Federation, which operates under the ruling Communist Party.
Doing a good job in women’s work is not only related to women’s own development, he said, but also related to “family harmony, social harmony, national development and national progress.”
It is necessary to “actively cultivate a new culture of marriage and childbearing and strengthen guidance on young people’s view on marriage, childbirth and family,” he said.
The proper response of any Chinese citizen to such pronouncements is “mind your own business.” But governments, especially authoritarian and totalitarian governments, tend not to do so.
Whether 1.4 billion people living in China are too few depends in part on whether the people are mere servants of the state. The Chinese government wants people to primarily serve various governmental purposes, not to primarily live their lives for the sake of their own individual purposes and happiness.
Also relevant is the possibility that China’s population is being systematically undercounted. Were it not for the aging of the population, 1.4 billion people might be okay for many of the state’s purposes. It’s a lot of people. But what if, despite official statistics, China’s population has not merely plateaued but is steadily declining? China scholar Steven Mosher thinks so. At his site pop.org, he writes (January 31, 2022):
Communist officials continue to insist that China’s population will stabilize at its present 1.4 billion, but they are whistling past the graveyard. With Chinese women averaging only 1.3 children, below even Japan’s anemic 1.34 children, China is surely already in absolute population decline, filling more coffins than cradles each year.
Signs that officialdom is hitting the panic button are everywhere. Decades of anti-natal propaganda threatening severe punishment for violating the one-child policy (“Have an illegal child and we’ll tear down your house!”) have been replaced by exhortations to couples to bear a second and even a third child. Having a baby is “not only a family matter, but is also a state affair,” women are now being told.
The New York Times adds (November 2, 2023):
The party desperately needs women to have more babies. China has been thrust into a demographic crisis as its birthrate has plummeted, causing its population to shrink for the first time since the 1960s. The authorities are scrambling to undo what experts have said is an irreversible trend, trying one initiative after another, such as cash handouts and tax benefits to encourage more births.
Mosher quotes women’s rights activist Xiao Meili, who says that “women’s uteruses are not spigots, to be turned on and off at will by the state.”
The Chinese government has not quite ended its birth-reduction policies. But it is now mostly imposing them only on certain groups, like the Uyghurs.
