Tag: Parenting

China Told Women to Have Babies, but Its Population Shrank Again

Media Library

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…

What Statistics Can’t Capture About the Global Baby Bust

Chin@Strategy

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 Helped Raise My American Kids, and They Turned Out Fine

Chin@Strategy

When Covid was raging across the world a couple of years ago, I came across a picture online of an American woman wearing a T-shirt that proclaimed, “I refuse to co-parent with the government” — a response to perceived government overreach regarding school mask mandates. I laughed out loud: My own kids were, in a way, co-parented by the Chinese government. My work in the fashion industry took my husband and me to Shanghai in 2006, where we spent the next 16 years and started a family. In China, government…

New Limits Give Chinese E-Gamers Whiplash

Chin@Strategy

Many in China’s gaming industry agree that games have some downsides. The most popular games in the country are made for smartphones and are free to play, meaning the businesses making them live and die based on how well they draw users in and get them to pay for extras. The game makers have become experts at hooking players. But top-down attempts to wean children off games — what state media has called “poison” and “spiritual pollution” — have sometimes been worse than the problem itself. Boot camps fond of…

New to the American Melting Pot, and Finding Its Taste Bittersweet

Chin@Strategy

Imagine you’re a kid, joining your mom for a day at work. This is no corporate-sponsored occasion where you’ll raid the supply closet and nibble cookies frosted with the company logo; it’s just a regular Saturday. Your mother, who was a math professor back in China, is now employed by a sushi processing plant near the Holland Tunnel. There you will stand for eight hours, clad in ill-fitting rubber boots and a hooded plastic onesie, while she guts and beheads an endless stream of salmon floating by on a metal…