China’s Demographic Crisis Is Here, and Women Are Feeling the Heat

The results of China’s once-a-decade census, released in early May, showed that the country’s population grew at its slowest pace since the PRC’s founding in 1949. From 2010 to 2020, China’s population increased just 5.38 percent, reaching 1.41 billion. That’s compared to 5.84 percent growth from 2000 to 2010, and 11.7 percent growth from 1990 to 2000. The declining birthrate in China is partly a natural consequence of increased incomes, a phenomenon seen around the world. But it’s also partly artificial, the result of Beijing’s previous population control efforts (most notably, the infamous “one child policy”).

As one of the knock-on effects of the slow-moving crisis, the census found that Chinese aged 15-59 (effectively working age) made up 63.35 percent of the population, a 6.8 percentage point drop from the 2010 census. Meanwhile, adults aged 65 and older now account for 13.50 percent of all Chinese, up by 5.44 points. In other words, there are fewer workers to support more and more elderly retirees. As the official press release of the census results dryly noted, “the further aging of the population imposes continued pressure on the long-term balanced development of the population in the coming period.”

The combination of a huge number of aging Chinese with dwindling births threatens a demographic crisis – particularly as China, unlike the United States, has little experience or interest in welcoming immigrants to ease the demographic burdens of a low birthrate. “Aging has become a basic national condition of China for a period of time to come,” Ning Jizhe, the commissioner of China’s National Bureau of Statistics, said at the press conference announcing the census results.

Efforts to boost the fertility rate by replacing the one child policy with a two-child limit have not had the desired effect. After a modest increase in 2016, when China first relaxed the one child policy, the birthrate has fallen every year. The country’s fertility rate stood at just 1.3 children per woman last year – well shy of the target of 1.8 set in 2016 for 2020 (for reference, a rate of 2.1 children per woman is needed for the population size to remain stable). The data for last year defied the wishful thinking of some analysts that forced lockdowns during COVID-19 would encourage a baby boom.

China, like so many other countries, is seeing family sizes dwindle as incomes grow. That’s in part because of the exploding costs of raising a family, which many parents point to when asked about their reasons for not having more (or any) children. But it’s also in part because of growing ambitions on the part of Chinese women, who are more educated than ever before. Their career ambitions, however, are hard to square with the reality that the number of state-supported childcare facilities has been on the decline for decades. As a result, many women must choose between having children and staying in the workforce. More and more women are choosing the latter, delaying or forgoing having children in order to focus on their careers. The Chinese government, faced with a demographic nightmare, is trying its damnedest to make them rethink that choice.

For example, the government imposed a mandatory 30-day “cooling off” period when filing for divorce. The goal was to encourage couples to stay together (and, implicitly, increase the odds of their raising a family). But critics say the mandatory delay increases the risks faced by women trying to leave abusive relationships.

More broadly, state media have ramped up a propaganda push urging women to have children for the good of the nation. “To put it bluntly, the birth of a baby is not only a matter of the family itself, but also a state affair,” the People’s Daily said in a much-criticized 2018 editorial. State organs rolled out missives urging women to get married early and take up more traditional roles in the home, under the guise of “family virtues.” Some local governments have gone further, placing new restrictions on abortions (after decades of easy access to encourage compliance with the one-child edict).

The reality is that most of China’s efforts to boost the birthrate place a unique burden on women. This development is not unrelated to the fact that the Chinese Communist Party remains largely a boy’s club. No woman has ever served on the CCP’s highest-ranking body, the Politburo Standing Committee, much less made it to the top leadership slot. Only one women, Sun Chunlan, is currently in the 25-member Politburo, the next rung down on China’s political ladder. With virtually no representation in the top levels of the CCP, women have little influence or say in the policies designed to push them to have more children.

The pressures on women are having a real-world impact: China is one of the rare countries where female participation in the labor force has actually decreased sharply since 1990, dropping from 73 percent that year to just 60 percent in 2019, according to World Bank data. A recent report from the Peterson Institute for International Economics found that “the gender gap in labor force participation rates in China has risen from 9.4 percentage points in 1990 to 14.1 percentage points in 2020 – while in other major economies including the U.S. the gap has been closing.”

The continued societal expectation that women will have and then stay home with children creates a vicious cycle. With few alternatives for care, many women do, in fact, leave the workforce if they want to raise children. As a result, women are seen as a bad risk for many employers and, with little to no legal protection against hiring discrimination, some firms openly state in their job advertisements that they will only consider male applicants. Women who are hired make around 20 percent less than their male colleagues and are less likely to be promoted. Those barriers decrease the opportunities for women, forcing even more of them into a home-based role. And the cycle continues.

Some Chinese women, however, are fighting back. Feminists are increasingly at odds with the state policy of encouraging more births. Leta Hong Fincher, author of “Leftover Women” and “Betraying Big Brother,” wrote for Politico about “the emergence of a broader, feminist awakening that is beginning to transform young women in cities across China.” That is sharply at odds with the Chinese Communist Party’s push to increase the birthrate, motivating a government crackdown on feminist groups and censorship of feminist discussions online.

“The outcome of this conflict between the patriarchal, authoritarian state and ordinary women who are increasingly pushing back against pressure to marry and have babies could have far-reaching consequences,” Hong Fincher argued.

The brutal irony is that all the pressure heaped upon women, and the government’s increasingly harsh treatment of young women espousing feminist ideals, are not actually solving the problem. Despite China’s continued efforts to cajole or, if necessary, coerce more women into motherhood, the birth rate continues to drop. If current trends continue, the next census in 2030 will mark China’s first real population decline.