Chinese women have had it. Their response to Beijing’s demands for more children? No.
Fed up with government harassment and wary of the sacrifices of child-rearing, many young women are putting themselves ahead of what Beijing and their families want. Their refusal has set off a crisis for the Communist Party, which desperately needs more babies to rejuvenate China’s aging population.
With the number of babies in free fall—fewer than 10 million were born in 2022, compared with around 16 million in 2012—China is headed toward a demographic collapse. China’s population, now around 1.4 billion, is likely to drop to just around half a billion by 2100, according to some projections. Women are taking the blame.
In October, Chinese Leader Xi Jinping urged the state-backed All-China Women’s Federation to “prevent and resolve risks in the women’s field,” according to an official account of the speech.
“It’s clear that he was not talking about risks faced by women but considering women as a major threat to social stability,” said Clyde Yicheng Wang, an assistant professor of politics at Washington and Lee University who studies Chinese government propaganda.
The State Council, China’s top government body, didn’t respond to questions about Beijing’s population policies.
That keeps getting cited in western media, but it’s really not the case. The obsession with bloodlines is true; however it is illegal here (I live in China, my wife is Chinese) to reveal the gender prior to birth; and punished severely. It’s still possible to find a doctor and bribe them, however the risk is so high that not many are able to pay up. I’ve heard numbers of up to 30k USD (!) going around (and that’s in today’s money), which is easily 2-3x the annual salary of a local worker.
So while the top ~10% or something could have afforded it, it was in fact much easier to just have a second kid and just hide it with some relatives in a village who’d pretend it was theirs. All the good it did to enforce the one child policy was to have a ton of unaccounted offspring running around in the countryside.
Current statistics show that 48.99% of Chinese are female vs. 51.01% male, while the global statistic is 50.49% male vs. 49.51% female. (That’s the global figure including China, so it’s a bit distorted, but not by a huge margin).
TL;DR: While there are a bit fewer women in China than the global average, it’s not really a relevant concern.