“No later, no longer, no fewer” could be China’s new family planning slogan this week as it attempts to reverse its draconian one-child policy that failed dramatically. Deng Xiaoping, by the mid-1970s helped introduce the family planning slogan “Late, long, and few,” meaning to encourage later marriages, longer intervals between births, and fewer children. The CCP no longer wants families to put off having children. It is changing the rules…. again… after recently allowing two children per family, and now three (although no one will be fined for additional births now). For four decades, married couples could try for one baby only after receiving a government family planning certificate, and then only within a designated timeframe. Today China finds itself in dire need of more people to run the country’s growing economy. The one-child policy was so demographically devastating that China cannot replicate its own population.
It is past the point of no return, according to demographers studying how populations reproduce. China’s total fertility rate declined 15% last year. In the last four years China has moved from 1.7 births per woman in 2016 to 1.3 last year. Statistically, a country needs a minimum birth rate of 2.11 to replace its population. Even if the Chinese government were to order every woman, young and old, to bear as many children as possible, it cannot recover in what may become known as the CCP’s most misguided and destabilizing program since its founding 100 years ago.
The CCP decided many decades ago that China had too many mouths using up the country’s resources. Its solution was to regulate every facet of life, including family size. In cities, factories required females of child-bearing age to sign in on a board hung up at the building’s entrance. On it, for all to see, a woman was required to indicate when she was menstruating. If she failed to mark her time of the month, she faced severe consequences for the potential pregnancy including fines, interrogation by supervisors and lectures from neighborhood birth planning enforcement “grannies,” a loss of health benefits, job, and possibly housing, forced abortion, and even forced sterilization.
The advantage of buying cheap drugs is viagra for cheap prices that they save money. Neogra oral jelly is free from harmful chemicals as high-quality ingredients are used while producing cialis canadian prices the Neogra oral jelly. So, it is always advisable to purchase generic cialis consult a doctor, before taking any sort of contraceptive pill. Medicines like viagra cialis india also are being sold from the online store via internet.The CCP goal was to reduce the high birth rate. It achieved the stated goal. What Chinese family planners failed to take into account was the long-term consequences of the harsh policy. According to a Global Times interview this week with Li Yue, a researcher at the China Population and Development Research Center, estimates are that an extremely low birth rate will occur between 2021 and 2025 due to the low willingness of women to have children and the postponement of pregnancies during the COVID-19 epidemic. Children are expensive to raise in China and many women fear losing momentum in their careers. Couples are not deciding to expand their families despite government incentives.
Three population factors may contribute to destabilizing the CCP’s rule in the next few years. First, China is now the most gender imbalanced nation on earth. Baby girls routinely are aborted in favor of having a little princeling. In 2019 the gender ratio in China was 114 males for every 100 females born. There are entire villages with no females of child-bearing age. Parents often are forced to “buy” their son a bride. Second, the declining birth rate means an increasingly gray population. Older parents rely on their children to take care of them in retirement. Statista reports that last year approximately 17.4% of China’s population is estimated to be over the age of 60 and this number is projected to rise to 34.6% in 2050. One adult child in the workforce could be responsible for the care of two parents and four grandparents. Lastly, China’s labor force has been in decline for the last seven years; each year losing 0.5%. The shrinking labor force comes at a time when China is attempting to dominate the international marketplace. There is no quick fix even with structural changes in the society. Some in China call it a crisis threatening the very survival of the nation. On the bright side, it may provide the rest of the world with an opportunity to re-evaluate how much influence it allows China to have over its intended transformation of the international rules-based system.
DARIA NOVAK served in the United States State Department during the Reagan Administration, and currently is on the Board of the American Analysis of News and Media Inc., which publishes usagovpolicy.com and the New York Analysis of Policy and Government. Each Friday, she presents key updates on China.
Illustration: Pixabay