Here is a noteworthy article from NY Times (of course;) which decries recent Chinese attempts to improve their abysmal birth rates:
...Faced with a declining population that threatens economic growth, the Chinese government is responding with a time-tested tactic: inserting itself into this most intimate of choices for women, whether or not to have a child...
At the very least, the in-your-face approach makes it harder for women to tune out calls by China’s leader, Xi Jinping, to get married and have babies. To some, it is outright invasive; on social media, women have complained about being approached by neighborhood officials, including some who they said called to ask the date of their last menstrual cycle.
Mr. Xi, who has overseen a crackdown on feminist activism, has said that promoting childbirth as a national priority is one step toward ensuring that women “always walk with the party.” (The country’s total fertility rate, a measure of the number of children a woman is expected to have over her lifetime, is among the world’s lowest. The rate is estimated at around 1.0, compared to 1.62 in the United States last year.)
South Korea has an even lower TFR with few attempts to improve it, btw.
The fertility campaign is also a reminder that the Chinese Communist Party has a long history of imposing its will on people’s reproductive decisions. For decades starting in the 1970s, it enforced a one-child policy, sometimes brutally. Officials fined couples who had unauthorized pregnancies and even forced some women to undergo abortions.
Here is something interesting. Some day somewhere on an American discussion forum I read that this policy had a Western origin. I did a short Google search and that it what I found:
In our latest Freakonomics Radio podcast... we describe an academic paper by a Dutch mathematics professor that might have been one of the inspirations of the controversial One Child Policy in China...
He meets Song Jian, a visitor from China with a Ph.D. in engineering from Moscow University. According to Olsder, they went out for beers and talked about population planning. Olsder thought nothing of it.
Song was a ballistics missiles specialist, but by the end of the 1980s he had established a theory of population control in Chinese political and science circles. Susan Greenhalgh, an expert on the One Child Policy who served 10 years at the Population Council, notes in her book that Song formed his theory largely based on ideas from the Club of Rome publication The Limits of Growth — a 1972 Malthusian work that hinted at catastrophe if resources and population were not balanced.
A conspiracy theory? May be. However, I bet that China was not the only one country influenced. What is this "Club Of Rome" you will ask? Per Wikipedia,
The Club of Rome is a nonprofit, informal organization of intellectuals and business leaders whose goal is a critical discussion of pressing global issues. The Club of Rome was founded in 1968 at Accademia dei Lincei in Rome, Italy. It consists[clarification needed] of one hundred full members selected from current and former heads of state and government, UN administrators, high-level politicians and government officials, diplomats, scientists, economists, and business leaders from around the globe.
The Limits To Growth was their 1st report, btw. But back to the article. In case you didn't know, the Chinese are now officially allowed to have 3 children:
As China’s economy developed, the party stepped back somewhat, though it never relinquished authority altogether, ruling in 2021 that couples could have three children.
But they don't want to.
“We’re not like people born in the 1970s or ’80s. Everyone knows that people born after the ’90s generally don’t want kids,” Ms. Yang said.
Because, you see, women have other concerns now:
For many women, the government’s nagging seemed out of step with their concerns... It failed to address the high cost of raising children and how they would juggle motherhood alongside their careers and other ambitions. (emphasis mine).
Zhang Rongxing, 38, who was walking with her preschool-age son near the artwork on a recent morning, said that local officials had asked both over the phone and in person if she was planning on having another child.
She was not. The two she already had were enough. “It’s too much work,” she said. “Mentally, financially, in terms of time.”
Some scholars, activists and ordinary women have worried that the government could move more forcefully to limit women’s choices. The central government has pledged in several recent health plans to reduce “medically unnecessary abortions”...
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