A Decade After Ending the One-Child Policy: China Fails to Raise Birth Rates

One of the biggest challenges facing China is encouraging more children.

           

A Decade After Ending the One-Child Policy: China Fails to Raise Birth Rates

One of the biggest long-standing domestic challenges facing China's leaders now is encouraging young people to have more children after decades of strict state-imposed birth control policies that negatively impacted the country's demographics.

People over the age of 60 now make up more than 20% of China’s 1.4 billion population, and this figure could reach half the population by 2100, according to UN projections. This reality has far-reaching implications, not only for China’s economy but also for its ambitions to rival the United States as a military power.

However, many in China believe that raising the birth rate requires addressing fundamental issues such as high youth unemployment, the rising costs of raising children, and what is perceived as an unfair burden placed on women in childcare.

Then there is the direct legacy of the “one-child policy,” which left China with a gender imbalance and a generation of children without siblings, left to care for their aging parents alone in a country where the social safety net remains weak in many areas.

A Drop in the Ocean

Now, Chinese authorities fear that their population will age before it prospers, so they have shifted to a policy of encouraging procreation. Marriage and childbirth are being promoted as the key to the nation’s future. To underline this shift, the country began imposing a value-added tax on condoms and other contraceptives on January 1st.

Beijing had previously announced its intention to eliminate direct hospital birth costs by 2026 and last month released a draft law to improve the regulation of childcare services. However, many believe that the benefits offered so far do little to alleviate the actual costs of raising children in China, which a 2024 study by the Yuwa Institute of Population Research in Beijing found to be among the most expensive places in the world to raise children.

A Slowing Economy

For many young Chinese people who came of age during and after the COVID-19 pandemic, policies encouraging marriage and childbirth are insufficient as they struggle to make ends meet. 

On the other hand, many young women see an advantage in China’s declining marriage rate, preferring to focus on their careers and rejecting entrenched norms that require women to manage their children’s education within China’s highly competitive education system.

Boyhood Policies

Yanzhong Huang, a senior fellow in global health at the Council on Foreign Relations, said the economic impact of the country’s shrinking workforce and consumer base, and the projected cost of caring for a growing elderly population, will be “profound.” 

Under President Xi Jinping, the country is also pursuing another solution to the shrinking workforce: using robots to automate factories. These measures may help the economy overcome the demographic challenges, but experts remain skeptical that they can significantly boost the birth rate.

“If we had changed the one-child policy 20 years ago, the situation would be much better,” says Yao Yang, dean of the De Shui Ho Institute of Advanced Finance at Shanghai University of Economics and Finance. “Now it’s too late.” Yang adds that “the long-term decline in the birth rate is irreversible for many reasons.”