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China’s ruling Communist Party is facing a national emergency. To fix it, the party wants more women to more have babies. It has offered them sweeteners, like cheaper housing, tax benefits and cash. It has also invoked patriotism, calling on them to be “good wives and mothers.” The efforts aren’t working. Chinese women have been shunning marriage and babies at such a rapid pace that China’s population in 2023 shrank for the second straight year, accelerating the government’s sense of crisis over the country’s rapidly aging population and its economic…
At China’s top political gathering for women, it was mostly a man who was seen and heard. Xi Jinping, the country’s leader, sat center stage at the opening of the National Women’s Congress. A close-up of him at the Congress was splashed on the front page of the Chinese Communist Party’s newspaper the next day. From the head of a large round table, Mr. Xi lectured female delegates at the closing meeting on Monday. “We should actively foster a new type of marriage and childbearing culture,” he said in a…
Adam Posen, the president of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, described China as suffering from a case of economic long Covid. In an article in the September-October issue of Foreign Affairs, he wrote: Like a patient suffering from that chronic condition, China’s body economic has not regained its vitality and remains sluggish even now that the acute phase — three years of exceedingly strict and costly “zero Covid” lockdown measures — has ended. The condition is systemic, and the only reliable cure — credibly assuring ordinary Chinese people and…
Despite the rollback of China’s one-child policy, and even after more recent incentives urging families to have more children, China’s population is steadily shrinking — a momentous shift that will soon leave India as the world’s most populous nation and have broad rippling effects both domestically and globally. The change puts China on the same course of both aging and shrinking as many of its neighbors in Asia, but its path will have outsize effects not just on the regional economy, but on the world at large as well. Here’s…
In China, a country that limits most couples to three children, one province is making a bold pitch to try to get its citizens to procreate: have as many babies as you want, even if you are unmarried. The initiative, which came into effect this month, points to the renewed urgency of China’s efforts to spark a baby boom after its population shrank last year for the first time since a national famine in the 1960s. Other efforts are underway — officials in several cities have urged college students to donate…
It’s a story that you can almost set your watch by: Every few months, new data or a new report will show that the birthrate in a country or region is too low to sustain economic growth, and that efforts to convince people to have more babies have failed. It’s a story that, in many ways, is made for the Interpreter, and one that I’m very much in the middle of as a busy working parent. That perhaps explains why analyzing this issue makes me feel like I am teetering…
China’s population has begun to decline, a demographic turning point for the country that has global implications. Experts had long anticipated this moment, but it arrived in 2022 several years earlier than expected, prompting hand-wringing among economists over the long-term impacts given the country’s immense economic heft and its role as the world’s manufacturer. With 850,000 fewer births than deaths last year, at least according to the country’s official report, China joined an expanding set of nations with shrinking populations caused by years of falling fertility and often little or…
It was a cold and overcast morning in November, but one full of promise for Guo Meiyan and her husband: They would finally get a chance to start a family. As Ms. Guo, 39, was wheeled on a gurney into a hospital room where a doctor transferred her eggs, which had been harvested and fertilized, back into her uterus, she also felt a sense of dread. “If the transplant is not successful, all the money we spent will be wasted, all the pain I endured will be wasted, and we…
The world’s most populous country has reached a pivotal moment: China’s population has begun to shrink, after a steady, yearslong decline in its birthrate that experts say will be irreversible. The government said on Tuesday that 9.56 million people were born in China in 2022, while 10.41 million people died. It was the first time deaths had outnumbered births in China since the early 1960s, when the Great Leap Forward, Mao Zedong’s failed economic experiment, led to widespread famine and death. Births were down from 10.6 million in 2021, the…