This week, an estimated 200 million unmarried Chinese return home to celebrate the lunar new year, arriving to homes filled with the aroma of dumplings and steaming fish and greeted by relatives who have many questions about when to get married. and start a family.
The annual inquisition is a predictable part of life for young Chinese whose social media channels are filled with viral how-to guides who can guide their unscrupulous parents.
“Everyone has their own technique,” says a Beijing teacher in her 20s, who has kept her boyfriend away from her family for years as a pre-emptive strategy against marriage demands.
Young Chinese have been devising creative tactics for decades to fend off their parents’ demands for marriage and grandchildren, put off by the exorbitant costs of modern child-rearing while juggling tax projects and high property prices in big cities.
The battle to get young Chinese people to marry and produce babies has moved from the family home to the political arena as the world’s most populous country enters a long-term and irreversible population crisis.
Last week, the Chinese authorities announced that the anticipated turning point has finally been reached: the official population will shrink in 2022 for the first time in 60 years, losing 850,000 people due to deaths exceeding births.
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China’s demographic outlook will be bleak, as its rapidly aging population is supported by a smaller number of tax-paying workers who fund its social welfare and hospital system, which Beijing’s dramatic reversal of anti-coronavirus restrictions last month has left in a fragile country.
In response, local governments began subsidizing families with more than one child. Others also use more creative tactics. Ningling County, in the central province of Henan, began the role of matchmaker at the end of December, sponsoring a speed dating event in which masked-up singletons were in the cold with numbers pinned to their winter coats.
But experts are pessimistic that the government’s efforts to raise the birth rate will be more effective than parents.
“Right now, nothing is stuck,” said Wang Feng, a sociologist and demographer at the University of California, Irvine. “It is easy for the government to write new slogans, but it is quite another to change the working environment and the lives of young people.”
In 2016, Beijing lifted its nearly four-decade-old one-child limit, the world’s toughest population policy, and by 2021 is encouraging couples to have up to three children. But the expected baby boom never materialized – after an initial surge in the first year, the number of babies in China fell every year thereafter.
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The decline accelerated during the pandemic as many Chinese delayed or decided not to have children, with the health crisis and economic instability brought on by zero-Covid restrictions weighing on couples. Henan’s birth rate, a measurement of the number of births per thousand people, fell by nearly 30 percent from 2019 to 2021.
Young people getting married will do so later, while the number of young people who can get married in China continues to shrink every year. The number of women of childbearing age, defined as between 15 and 49 years, fell by more than 4 million years ago, a legacy of the one-child policy.
Lü Pin, a Chinese feminist activist in New York, said the government’s initiative to encourage marriage has been “ineffective” because it does not address “the real reasons young people don’t want to have children”, which have cultural and economic roots.
“Young people no longer see childbirth as inevitable,” she said, pointing to changing social and professional goals among China’s youth. “They don’t feel bound by the tradition of raising children.”
Rising youth unemployment, rising housing and education prices in big cities and rising health care costs to care for more elderly relatives have created strong disincentives for young Chinese to start families.
One Beijing resident in his 20s said he had responded to a relative’s question by asking if marriage was “a cult of people who want to recruit more people to the institution after marriage”.
Another tactic promoted in online videos is for women to undergo a course of human papillomavirus vaccination, which requires three shots over 18 months, during which time they are advised not to become pregnant.
Lü predicts that young people will continue to shun official efforts to improve fertility, despite the pressure. “They don’t want to be born tools for the country,” he said.
Additional reporting by Xinning Liu in Beijing