The grim news regarding China’s ongoing demographic crisis keeps piling up. The past two years saw the population of the country actually decline, with an acceleration in the long-term trend of lower fertility rates among Chinese women. The most recent report by the highly respected Beijing-based YuWa Population Research Institute issued in February of this year[1] casts a harsh spotlight on one important reason why these adverse population trends are likely to continue. According to the Institute, China is the second most expensive country in the world to raise children. These costs, in turn, are a major factor behind the reluctance of Chinese married and single women to have children.
According to official Chinese Government data, the population of China dropped by 2.08 million people in 2023,[2] with the number of death (11 million) exceeding the number of births (9 million). This fall followed a population decline of 850,000 people in 2022. New births fell by 5.7%[3] in 2023. That drop reflects the worsening trend in China’s fertility rate,[4] which had fallen steadily from 1.5 births per woman in the late 1990s to 1.15 by 2021 (the fertility rate is the number of children a woman will give birth to in her lifetime). It is now approaching 1.0, or under half of the replacement rate of 2.1 needed for a country to sustain its population. According to a May 1, 2024 Scientific American article,[5] China’s population could fall by half over this century.
The YuWa Institute reports pinpoints one key driving force behind the Chinese population meltdown, namely the high cost of raising children in the People’s Republic. The report notes that there is only one country in the world, South Korea, where the costs of raising a child exceeds that of China. It comes as no surprise that South Korean women have even fewer children than their Chinese counterparts.
The Institute examined the average cost of raising a child in China until the age of 18 and compared that figure to its GDP per capita vs. that of more affluent advanced economies. It found that these costs were 6.3 times as high as the Chinese GDP per capita. This compares to 4.11 times per capita GDP in the US, 4.26 times per capita GDP in Japan, 2.08 times per capital GDP in Australia, and 2.24 times per capita GDP in France. According to YuWa, it costs Chinese families an average of 538,312 Yuan, or nearly $73,000 to raise a child up to the age of 18.
YuWa further notes that these costs vary markedly between urban vs. rural and upper vs. middle-class households. Urban families spend an average of 666,699 Yuan, or nearly $93,000, raising a child while rural households spend an average of 364,868 Yuan, or nearly $51,000 raising a child. Thus, the fertility rate of woman in affluent Shanghai, China’s economic powerhouse, is especially low, standing at 0.7 in 2022.[6]
The YuWa report also emphasizes the disproportionate economic cost borne by Chinese women in bearing and raising children. It documents in detail the extensive opportunity costs that come with being a mother in China. According to YuWa, Chinese women generally see a reduction of 2,106 working hours when caring for children aged 0-4 and are hit with an estimated wage loss of 63,000 yuan, or $8,700, during this period. These figures are based on an estimated wage of 30 Yuan per hour. Besides facing a 12-17% fall in wags, women get a significant reduction of their leisure time, which rises further when they have more than one child.
In contrast to women, the livelihoods of Chinese men do not change much after marriage and children. Fathers do experience only a loss in leisure time, however, that loss is not as great as the loss in leisure time borne by their spouses. Moreover, as is true throughout most of the world, in China, women face the so-called “double shift.” They are largely responsible for household tasks, such as cleaning, cooking, and shopping, as well as taking care of children. The latter responsibilities including getting their children to school and providing them with tutoring and assistance with school homework.
The high opportunity costs for Chinese women in having children extend beyond loss of income and leisure time. YuWa reviews the well-known and heavily documented job discrimination women encounter when seeking to balance work and becoming mothers. Women taking maternity leave often confront “unfair treatment” at the hands of employers, including being transferred to other teams, being hit with pay cuts, or being denied promotion opportunities. YuWa adds that if the costs of maternity leave are entirely borne by a woman’s employer, without any government aid, employers may avoid recruiting women of childbearing age. This treatment extends even to female job applicants who insist they have no plans to have children.
When choosing between advancing their careers vs. having children, Chinese women therefore face painful tradeoffs. At the same time, they are now more educated and economically independent than ever.[7] Women currently outnumber men in higher education programs in China—disclosure alert, when I taught English at two Chinese universities, I found the ladies to generally be much better students than the fellows. As more and more career paths open up for them, Chinese women are giving equal, if not more priority, to their careers and self-development as opposed to being wives and mothers. Given the obstacles being a mother places on their ability to earn money to secure financial independence, advance in their careers, and have leisure time, it is hardly shocking that more and more Chinese women are saying no to children. In a 2021 Chinese General Survey,[8] 48.3% of women questioned said they wanted just one or no children.
The findings of that 2021 survey are in line with the observation of the writer Zhang Lijia, who has explored changing attitudes toward marriage and motherhoods among Chinese women. In a February 21, 2024 Guardian article[9] on the YuWa Institute report, she notes that the high costs of education in China’s ultra-competitive educational system and housing make raising children financially difficult. Zhang states that, “Many women I interviewed simply couldn’t afford to have two to three children. Some can manage one; others don’t even want to bother with one.” Zhang further adds, “Another equally important factor is changing attitudes. Many urban and educated women no longer see motherhood as the necessary passage in in life or the necessary ingredient for happiness.”
Zhang’s comments regarding the affordability of having more than one child for Chinese couples dovetail with one of my more memorable China experiences. Toward the end of my time in the country, which lasted from August 2005 to June 2016, I had to go to the dentist to get a couple of crowns put in—this procedure was done without any Novocaine (in China, you are charged extra for Novocaine, and I decided to tough it out and save a bit of money; fortunately, the teeth were dead). I went to a higher-end dental clinic opposite my place of work, which was then an independent Chinese think tank, The Center of China and Globalization, where I was a senior research fellow. For some reason, the dentist who did this work offered to buy me dinner at a nearby upscale Beijing restaurant, Hatsune, to which I gladly said “yes.” I asked him, in my imperfect Mandarin, about his family and he indicated that he had a wife and daughter. At that time, China had relaxed the one-child policy for urban couples, so I asked whether he and his wife planned on having another child. The dentist answered “no,” citing the high costs of doing that. A second child, he explained, would necessitate moving into a larger apartment, so the new member of the family would have his/her own room. The dentist further noted the high cost educating his daughter, which involved extensive extracurricular stuff aimed at giving her up leg up in school, such as ballet and music lessons, English tutoring, and the like. This fellow’s wife also worked as a dentist at a higher-end dental clinic, so they were comfortable, upper middle-class Chinese “Chuppies.” Yet they felt, at least at that time, that it was not possible to afford having a bigger family.
YuWa concludes its report by arguing that China faces an “urgent need” at the national level to institute policies aimed at reducing the costs of child-bearing. It calls for cash and tax subsidies for families with children, improved childcare services, generous maternity leave, access to foreign nannies, allowing flexible working, and giving single women the same reproductive rights as married women. There is no indication that the Chinese Government will be implementing these recommendations anytime soon.
Even if the government were ready take up YuWa’s program for boosting birthrates, it is not at all that doing that would be very impactful. My skepticism stems from the experience of comparable East Asian countries plagued with low fertility rates and population declines. The case of South Korea, which, like China, has a Confucian culture, is especially instructive. Over the past decade and a half, South Korea has spent $200 billion in a concerted effort to get its women to have more children.[10] These funds have gone to a variety of pronatalist policies, including cash bonuses and other subsidies to couples having children, improving access to child-care, and the like. Despite all of this, fertility rates among South Korean women have hardly budged and remain among the lowest in the world. Indeed, the South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol is now calling his country’s low birthrate a “national emergency,” announcing on May 9th the creation of a special ministry to tackle this crisis.[11] I could add that in Japan, government efforts to get women to have more children have shown a similar lack of effectiveness.[12] Fertility rates across East Asian countries, including China, are clearly “sticky” upward.
Chinese National Government officials are oddly sanguine about their country’s dreadful demography. In particular, they have embraced rosy projections regarding future Chinese fertility rates.[13]. The 2016-2030 population development plan devised by the National State Council assumes that Chinese fertility rates will rebound to 1.8 by 2030. The municipal population plan issued by city of Wenzhou, an economically dynamic Chinese coastal metropolis, makes similar sunny predictions, stating that its total fertility rate will go back up to around 1.35 by 2035. This flies in the face of not just contemporaneous East Asian demographic trends, but all of the evidence on Chinese fertility, as elucidated in the latest YuWa report and other scholarly research on this matter. It is pure and simple magical thinking.
China’s demographic collapse is set to continue.
[1]. Liang Jianzhang, Huang Wenzhou, and He Yafu, “中国生育成本报告, 2024 (China’s Childbirth Cost Report, 2024),” Beijing: YuWa Population Research Institute, 2024. URL: https://file.c-ctrip.com/files/6/yuwa/0R72u12000d9cuimnBF37.pdf.
[2]. Jacob Funk Kirkegaard, “China’s population decline is getting close to irreversible,” Petersen Institute of International Economics, January 18, 2024. URL: https://www.piie.com/research/piie-charts/2024/chinas-population-decline-getting-close-irreversible.
[3]. Farah Master, “China’s population drops for second year, with record low birth rate,” Reuters, January 17, 2024. URL: https://www.reuters.com/world/china/chinas-population-drops-2nd-year-raises-long-term-growth-concerns-2024-01-17/.
[4]. Carl Minzer, “China’s Population Decline Continues,” Council on Foreign Relations, January 26, 2024. URL: https://www.cfr.org/blog/chinas-population-decline-continues#:~:text=Statistics%20suggest%20that%20China’s%20total,would%20maintain%20current%20population%20levels.
[5]. Lex Reiffel and Wang Xueqing, “China’s Population Could Shrink to Half by 2100,” Scientific American, May 5, 2024. URL: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/chinas-population-could-shrink-to-half-by-2100/.
[6]. Zhou Wenting, “Shanghai weighs options to tackle birthrate decline,” China Daily, April 1, 2024. URL: https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202401/27/WS65b44481a3105f21a507e9ee.html#:~:text=The%20latest%20Shanghai%20Health%20Commission,one%20of%20the%20lowest%20nationally.
[7]. Nectar Gao, “Chinese millennials aren’t getting married, and the government is worried,” CNN, January 29, 2021. URL: https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/29/china/china-millennials-marriage-intl-hnk/index.html.
[8]. “China’s low fertility trap. The one-child policy may be gone, but its harmful affects linger,’ The Economist, March 24, 2024. URL: https://www.economist.com/china/2024/03/21/chinas-low-fertility-trap.
[9]. Amy Hawkins, “Cost of raising children China second-highest in the world, think tank reveals,” The Guardian, February 21, 2024. URL: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/feb/21/cost-of-raising-children-in-china-is-second-highest-in-the-world-think-tank-reveals.
[10]. Paula Hancock, “South Korea spent $200 billion, but it can’t pay people enough to have a baby,” CNN, December 4, 2022. URL: https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/03/asia/south-korea-worlds-lowest-fertility-rate-intl-hnk-dst/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/03/asia/south-korea-worlds-lowest-fertility-rate-intl-hnk-dst/index.htm.
[11]. Thomas Maresca, “South Korea will establish ministry to address low birth rate, Yoon says,” UPI, May 9, 2024. URL: https://www.upi.com/Top_News/World-News/2024/05/09/Yoon-Suk-Yeol-South-Korea-press-conference-birth-rate-Dior-bag-scandal/9081715248169/
[12]. Victoria Boydell, Rintaro Mori, Sadequa Shahrook, and Stuart Gietel-Basten, “Low fertility and fertility policies in the Asian Pacific region,” Global Health and Medicine, Washington, DC: National Institute of Health, October 31, 2023. URL: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10615026/.
[13]. Carl Minzer, “China’s Population Decline Continues,” Council on Foreign Relations, January 26, 2024. URL: https://www.cfr.org/blog/chinas-population-decline-continues#:~:text=Statistics%20suggest%20that%20China’s%20total,would%20maintain%20current%20population%20levels.