For some Chinese women it 'doesn't make sense' to have babies

For some Chinese women it ‘doesn’t make sense’ to have babies

Top-down policy initiatives fail to account for a society whose attitudes towards women have changed little over time.
Women wearing face masks take selfies together at the Temple of Heaven park in Beijing, China. It is a sunny February day and the sky is blue.

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Women in 21st century China want more from their lives than marriage and children [File: Andy Wong/AP Photo]
By Frederik Kelter
Published On 1 Mar 20231 Mar 2023

After three Lunar New Year holidays in a row disrupted by China’s zero-COVID policy, Ann Pei, Mona Zhao, and Wenyi Hai were thrilled to be able to leave Shanghai and return to their families for this year’s festive season. But amid the excitement, they were also a little apprehensive. “I knew that my mum and my grandparents would want to have a talk with me about marriage and children, especially since I’m in my thirties, and I wasn’t looking forward to that,” 31-year-old Ann Pei told Al Jazeera as she was preparing to head home to family near the city of Changchun in northeastern China.

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Facing population decline

Chinese President Xi Jinping has a vision of “national rejuvenation” for China, but to realise that vision, he needs more women to have children. In January, China’s National Bureau of Statistics reported the population dropped by 850,000 people in 2022 – the first decline since the last year of the Great Famine in 1961. The fall comes in the wake of a birth rate that has been steadily declining since the implementation of the one-child policy in 1980. It has continued to fall even though the policy was abolished in 2015, suggesting that 2022’s population drop was not an exception but the start of a trend. The issue is set to be one of the key areas of discussion at the annual meeting of China’s parliament, which begins at the weekend.


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China’s population dropped in 2022 for the first time since the famine at the end of the Great Leap Forward in the early 1960s [File: Shigeo Ohguma/Kyodo News Service via AP Photo]
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Chinese President Xi Jinping has said that Chinese women should be ‘good wives, good mothers’ but many no longer find that idea appealing [File: Aly Song/Reuters]


Reinforcing patriarchy

Xi reiterated in his speech at the 20th National Party Congress last October that getting families to have more children was at the top of his agenda. “We will improve the population development strategy, establish a policy system to boost birth rates, and bring down the costs of pregnancy and childbirth, childrearing and schooling,” the president said. Cities like Beijing and Shanghai have taken steps to guarantee better parental leave arrangements and a more equitable distribution of leave between mothers and fathers.


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But while women might have moved into new territory in recent decades, the country’s norms and social values have not progressed at the same pace. “Women’s advancement was prompted by state-imposed changes and not because the social culture changed, so as these women reach childbearing age, they find themselves still subjected to the traditional gender ideology and the established family roles,” Chen said. According to Ann Pei, it is high time that society catches up. “If they want more babies, they need to let us start families on our own terms instead of pushing us into an old-fashioned one-size-fits-all model that requires women to abandon careers and dreams,” she said.

“I will not give up my life to start a family.”

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/3/1/for-some-chinese-women-it-doesnt-make-sense-to-have-babies