For some Chinese women it 'doesn't make sense' to have babies

[niyad]

For some Chinese women it ‘doesn’t make sense’ to have babies

Top-down policy initiatives fail to account for a society whose attitudes towards women have changed little over time.
Women wearing face masks take selfies together at the Temple of Heaven park in Beijing, China. It is a sunny February day and the sky is blue.

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Women in 21st century China want more from their lives than marriage and children [File: Andy Wong/AP Photo]
By Frederik Kelter
Published On 1 Mar 20231 Mar 2023

After three Lunar New Year holidays in a row disrupted by China’s zero-COVID policy, Ann Pei, Mona Zhao, and Wenyi Hai were thrilled to be able to leave Shanghai and return to their families for this year’s festive season. But amid the excitement, they were also a little apprehensive. “I knew that my mum and my grandparents would want to have a talk with me about marriage and children, especially since I’m in my thirties, and I wasn’t looking forward to that,” 31-year-old Ann Pei told Al Jazeera as she was preparing to head home to family near the city of Changchun in northeastern China.

. . . . .

Facing population decline

Chinese President Xi Jinping has a vision of “national rejuvenation” for China, but to realise that vision, he needs more women to have children. In January, China’s National Bureau of Statistics reported the population dropped by 850,000 people in 2022 – the first decline since the last year of the Great Famine in 1961. The fall comes in the wake of a birth rate that has been steadily declining since the implementation of the one-child policy in 1980. It has continued to fall even though the policy was abolished in 2015, suggesting that 2022’s population drop was not an exception but the start of a trend. The issue is set to be one of the key areas of discussion at the annual meeting of China’s parliament, which begins at the weekend.


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China’s population dropped in 2022 for the first time since the famine at the end of the Great Leap Forward in the early 1960s [File: Shigeo Ohguma/Kyodo News Service via AP Photo]
. . . . . .


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Chinese President Xi Jinping has said that Chinese women should be ‘good wives, good mothers’ but many no longer find that idea appealing [File: Aly Song/Reuters]


Reinforcing patriarchy

Xi reiterated in his speech at the 20th National Party Congress last October that getting families to have more children was at the top of his agenda. “We will improve the population development strategy, establish a policy system to boost birth rates, and bring down the costs of pregnancy and childbirth, childrearing and schooling,” the president said. Cities like Beijing and Shanghai have taken steps to guarantee better parental leave arrangements and a more equitable distribution of leave between mothers and fathers.


. . . .

But while women might have moved into new territory in recent decades, the country’s norms and social values have not progressed at the same pace. “Women’s advancement was prompted by state-imposed changes and not because the social culture changed, so as these women reach childbearing age, they find themselves still subjected to the traditional gender ideology and the established family roles,” Chen said. According to Ann Pei, it is high time that society catches up. “If they want more babies, they need to let us start families on our own terms instead of pushing us into an old-fashioned one-size-fits-all model that requires women to abandon careers and dreams,” she said.

“I will not give up my life to start a family.”

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/3/1/for-some-chinese-women-it-doesnt-make-sense-to-have-babies

[aocommunalpunch]

1. Fuckin-a right.

"I will not give up my life to start a family."

[niyad]

2. EXACTLY!!!!!

[paleotn]

13. Bingo! +1000

[haele]

3. In a free society, raising a child is a family project, not just women's work.

Too many cultures developed the idea that somehow, women and children were property and women's work was only inside the house, while men's work was outside.

Haele

[hippywife]

4. This is all well and good:

“We will improve the population development strategy, establish a policy system to boost birth rates, and bring down the costs of pregnancy and childbirth, childrearing and schooling,” the president said. Cities like Beijing and Shanghai have taken steps to guarantee better parental leave arrangements and a more equitable distribution of leave between mothers and fathers."

However, "if improve the population development strategy" and "establish a policy system to boost birth rates" includes anything other than the factors that follow in that sentence, forced birth policies for example, then all bets are off. They can't expect success, only resistance, and well earned, at that.

[SheltieLover]

5. Our planet hardly needs more humans.

[Duppers]

7. zactly!

Thanks, SL.

[musette_sf]

6. "I will not give up my life to start a family."

[Warpy]

8. Given the population of China, this is probably a good thing

and there are most likely lots of women who want nothing more than marriage and children. They'll have their pick of prospective husbands, too, so marriage brokers are going to have to hustle a bit.

[ProfessorGAC]

16. The Population Is So Oversized...

...that despite their economic development their per capita GDP is over $57,000 lower than the US. (Just under $13k vs. just over $70k)
Their economy is around 60% the size of the US.
That disconnect can be directly traced to an outsized population.

[Warpy]

19. Yes, partially. This is hard on families who went through the one child policy

but sometimes people need to think beyond their own DNA.

Of course, I looked at my own heritage and said no way in hell, so there's that.

I think these women, along with similar women in Japan who are making their mothers despair, have simply looked at the pinched lives their mothers had and decided they didn't want to live like that. Others just have no interest in babies or children. Still others have no interest in men.

It's not going to be any sort of a problem for many, many decades as the majority will still marry and have children.

[ProfessorGAC]

21. I Read That Article On Japan

The corporate patriarchal thinking is helping to drive that population decline.
Women who like their jobs almost have to pick their career over family.
A problem made of Japan's own male dominated corporate culture.
Promotions withheld because women MIGHT have kids! So, women not even getting married to convince management they're not in a hurry for family life.
It's a mess in both countries.

[Warpy]

22. It's a similar mess here

as women who played the man's game and waited until their late 30s to have the kids they always wanted have their careers go off a cliff. Men just can't get past a couple of ideas: first, our brains don't come out when the baby does and second, there are people called nannies in the world.

[ProfessorGAC]

23. I Can See That

I worked for a company where 3 of the 7 people on the executive committee were women.
Women were site directors in 10 of the 28 manufacturing sites, there were 3 out of 6 R&D department heads, too.
So, my last exposure to the corporate environment was apparently more enlightened than I suspected.

[Sogo]

9. China could do with a shrinking population.

They can't even feed all the people they already have. The largest hog confinement corporation in the US is owned by China. They come here and ruin our air and water quality to feed their people.....Enough!!

[roamer65]

10. Inflation, war and climate change.

I don’t blame them for not wanting to bring children into this clusterfuck.

[paleotn]

15. Agreed. Particularly in an increasingly bellicose and authoritarian country.

[roamer65]

18. +1000

[treestar]

11. a billion + people isn't enough?

maybe they should consider immigration!

[GeoWilliam750]

12. At the current reproductive rates, Chinas population will about halve over the rest of the century

The current fertility rate is about 1.08, versus a necessity of 2.1 children per woman in her life.

[paleotn]

14. To 750M giver or take. And that's a good thing.

But still more than twice that of the US currently.

[GeoWilliam750]

17. One of the really fascinating things in current population growth rates

Is that over the next 50 years, Africa will account for about 70-75% of all babies born in the world, with relatively few non-African babies being born in 2070.

This is also fascinating because it is by far the most genetically diverse region in the world, meaning that many existing drugs created for Caucasian patients do not work as well on African.

Go back and look at demographics - it is very intriguing.

[FakeNoose]

20. They're kind of where we American women were in the late 1960's

I mean, we had more freedom to protest our society's entrapment than they will ever have. But the women's movement that enlightened so many of us BabyBoomers, well ... the educated Chinese women are just waking up to the possibility of freedom from society's expectations for them.

It was never about hating men ... it was always about breaking free of the cultural expectations, and many American men couldn't see it that way. Most of them weren't raised that way, so they've been blind to it for most of their lives.

[GenThePerservering]

24. "It was never about hating men"

EXACTLY!!