China is home currently to 241 million people over the age of 60, approximately 17% of the population. By 2050, the elderly will number around 500 million and account for more than one-third of the population. According to a report on Monday by Bloomberg News, the Chinese government has grown so alarmed by these developments that it's preparing to scrap all limits on the number of children that a family can have. By early next year, the infamous one-child and -- more recently -- two-child policies should be no more.
That decision is worth celebrating as a victory for reproductive rights. On its own, however, it won't inspire a baby boom. To encourage Chinese to have more children, the government is going to have to overcome some deeply ingrained biases and make it easier -- not harder -- for women to work while raising kids. China's been ageing since at least 1965, when the country's modern fertility rate peaked. Several factors contributed to the subsequent decline, including the Cultural Revolution and coercive Maoist campaigns to promote later marriages, greater spacing between births, and fewer children. By one accounting, as much as three-quarters of China's fertility decline since 1970 took place even before the government introduced the one-child policy late in that decade.
Indeed, despite being often brutally enforced, the policy's impact on China's fertility rate, population and gender balance appears to have been limited. During the 1980s, the most intense period of enforcement, China's fertility rate hardly changed at all. When the rate began to decline again in the 1990s, finally falling below replacement value, economic changes appear to have been the cause. Young Chinese, especially women, suddenly had greater access to education and jobs. To escape the burdens of small-town China, where they were expected to stay in the home and raise families, millions of women migrated to cities and took up factory work. Others took advantage of an expanding education system. Today, 52% of Chinese women enrol in tertiary education while fewer than 40% of men do the same. Career independence is a common goal, with 63.3% of women participating in the workforce.
These women face discrimination, even from the government, for choosing work over children. Since 2007, the government has promoted the term "leftover women" to scapegoat successful, educated, unmarried, urban women over the age of 27. The official attitudes trickle down to workplaces, where according to one 2017 survey, 43% of women with graduate degrees experienced employment discrimination (compared to 22% overall). Likewise, married women without children and women in prime child-bearing years were much more likely to face discrimination than their peers.
Pushing women to leave the workforce to have kids will hardly help matters. At a time when the cost of raising children in China is becoming ever more expensive, women need equal access to the job market and equal pay. The first step should be to ensure both by actively enforcing anti-discrimination laws. That's part of a successful approach that Sweden adopted as early as the 1930s to boost a declining fertility rate, and there's no reason -- beyond political will -- that it couldn't be successful in China, too.
Officials also need to rethink well-meaning policies that are designed to help working women. For example, last year the government expanded parental-leave policies in 30 provinces. Yet rather than be embraced by the public, the decision was widely dismissed as yet another excuse for employers to avoid hiring and promoting women of child-bearing age. Instead of lengthening leaves, they should be shortened and be made more generous.
They should then be supplemented with the introduction of a universal childcare programme. While expensive, that's not as far-fetched as it might seem. After all, China is keen to expand its service economy and childcare is an excellent way to boost employment. If employment shortages emerge, migrants from Southeast Asia could help fill the gap. A programme could be rolled out in stages from expensive cities to the rural countryside, where demand is lower due to the presence of extended families and grandparents.
There's no question that China's low fertility rate is a long-term burden. But it's also a reminder of the extraordinary economic and social progress the country has made over four decades. As China looks to increase its population, it should do so by embracing those changes, not seeking to reverse them. - Bloomberg
Adam Minter is a Bloomberg columnist.
