China demographics thread.

[JsCh]

Report in Chinese,

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some excerpt with google translate,

The total population of our country is huge, and the aging of the population has deepened in recent years. Further optimizing the childbirth policy, implementing the policy that one couple can have three children and supporting supporting measures will help improve my country's population structure, implement the national strategy to actively respond to the aging of the population, and maintain my country's human resource endowment advantages.​

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　　The meeting emphasized that party committees and governments at all levels should strengthen overall planning, policy coordination and work implementation, organize the implementation of the three-child birth policy in accordance with the law, promote the coordination of the birth policy and related economic and social policies, and improve the population impact assessment mechanism of major economic and social policies. We must consider marriage, childbirth, parenting, and education, strengthen the education and guidance of marriage and family views of married young people, control bad social customs such as bad marriages, high-priced gifts, improve the level of prenatal and postnatal care services, and develop a universal childcare service system , Promote education equity and the supply of high-quality educational resources, and reduce family education expenditures. It is necessary to improve the maternity leave and maternity insurance system, strengthen taxation, housing and other supporting policies, and protect the legitimate rights and interests of women in employment. For single-child families and rural family planning double-daughter families before the adjustment of the comprehensive two-child policy, the current incentive and assistance systems and preferential policies should continue to be implemented. It is necessary to establish and improve a comprehensive support and protection system for special family planning families, improve the support and care work mechanism led by the government and participate in social organizations, and safeguard the legitimate rights and interests of family planning families. It is necessary to deepen the research on the national medium and long-term population development strategy and regional population development planning to promote long-term balanced population development.​

 

[Kaeshmiri]

Report in Chinese,

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

some excerpt with google translate,

The total population of our country is huge, and the aging of the population has deepened in recent years. Further optimizing the childbirth policy, implementing the policy that one couple can have three children and supporting supporting measures will help improve my country's population structure, implement the national strategy to actively respond to the aging of the population, and maintain my country's human resource endowment advantages.​

​

　　The meeting emphasized that party committees and governments at all levels should strengthen overall planning, policy coordination and work implementation, organize the implementation of the three-child birth policy in accordance with the law, promote the coordination of the birth policy and related economic and social policies, and improve the population impact assessment mechanism of major economic and social policies. We must consider marriage, childbirth, parenting, and education, strengthen the education and guidance of marriage and family views of married young people, control bad social customs such as bad marriages, high-priced gifts, improve the level of prenatal and postnatal care services, and develop a universal childcare service system , Promote education equity and the supply of high-quality educational resources, and reduce family education expenditures. It is necessary to improve the maternity leave and maternity insurance system, strengthen taxation, housing and other supporting policies, and protect the legitimate rights and interests of women in employment. For single-child families and rural family planning double-daughter families before the adjustment of the comprehensive two-child policy, the current incentive and assistance systems and preferential policies should continue to be implemented. It is necessary to establish and improve a comprehensive support and protection system for special family planning families, improve the support and care work mechanism led by the government and participate in social organizations, and safeguard the legitimate rights and interests of family planning families. It is necessary to deepen the research on the national medium and long-term population development strategy and regional population development planning to promote long-term balanced population development.​

These incentives are very similar to what Japan did but it didn't work. There also needs to be a cultural shift .
Now the reason i wanted the limits gone is that having a limit signifies that beyond a specific number children become a burden on the nation and family. This notion of children being a burden itself needs to go.

Also China is the only nation that can enable a "carrots and stick" approach. Only carrots wont work (Japan is proof).

 

[voyager1]

These incentives are very similar to what Japan did but it didn't work. There also needs to be a cultural shift .
Now the reason i wanted the limits gone is that having a limit signifies that beyond a specific number children become a burden on the nation and family. This notion of children being a burden itself needs to go.

Also China is the only nation that can enable a "carrots and stick" approach. Only carrots wont work (Japan is proof).

Ideally you would want super cheap child care Dramatically reduce education pressure on the kids
And then start a massive nationwide PR (propaganda..) campaign for promoting children

Couple that with better chances on getting promotion on SOEs and increasing pay depending on how many children you have (IMO this would be big)

 

[antiterror13]

Japan has a population roughly 3x smaller than the USA.

If Japan was to eclipse the US as a superpower, how likely was it that the average Japanese person would become more than 3x richer than the average American?

In 1980s, the ratio of population of Japan : USA was like 1:2

 

[Mr T]

Lifting the cap is a necessary step, but like some others I think more needs to be done.

Ideally you would want super cheap child care Dramatically reduce education pressure on the kids
And then start a massive nationwide PR (propaganda..) campaign for promoting children

Subsidised child care is important. As for education, if you're going to reduce the pressure I think it needs huge investment. There's far too much disparity between schools in urban and rural areas, and that hugely affects how your higher education progresses. In turn that increases stress on parents, which many people want to avoid. So I would:

1. increase investment in teacher training;
2. increase teacher salaries (to attract better quality candidates), with no variation for rural and urban areas (to try to stop the brain drain to the cities);
3. guarantee a spending level for each child so the schools get a minimum level of funding;
4. have top-up spending for children from poor backgrounds;
5. abolish hukou penalties for families - ensure that migrant workers can bring their children with them and get a good education in the cities. These are people the Chinese government should be rewarding, not punishing;
6. abolish tuition fees for public-sector schools or have the State pay for parents below a fairly generous wage;
7. abolish reserved places for local students at top universities - people born in Beijing do not need to go there.

If you do all this you will set the groundwork for an improved education system that people will feel more confident about, and in turn they'll think having a child isn't so bad.

As for a PR campaign, I doubt that would do much. For the last several decades the CCP has been pushing the story "growth, growth, growth - jobs, jobs, jobs - money, money, money". You can't change that with some positive stories about having children. Chinese people have to work hard even if they don't have children, so they can't be tricked into thinking having babies will be a breeze. Equally women aren't going to lie back and think of China.

If you really want to do something about perceptions, encouraging men to spend more time with child rearing and house work would be more productive, I think.

Couple that with better chances on getting promotion on SOEs and increasing pay depending on how many children you have (IMO this would be big)

I think that would be both unfair and counter-productive. Not everyone is able to have large families, and it could encourage people to have lots of children they couldn't afford in expectation of getting a good job to pay for them. Then there's the fact you could end up with very incompetent people getting well paid, which would lease to worse outcomes for the company and resentment amongst other workers.

Perhaps what you meant or could have suggested was increased subsidies for parents. So, for example, their employers could offer free or subsidied child-care at their offices/nearby. This could be done privately or with financial assistance from the state. That way the parents find it easier to support their children and work but they're not getting ahead career-wise.

EDIT: Added in further reply below.

Also China is the only nation that can enable a "carrots and stick" approach. Only carrots wont work (Japan is proof).

Not sure what stick you're thinking of, but punishing people for not having children if they have fertility problems would be immoral. Also I think that if you started restricting birth-control you'd end up with more women dying in back street clinics - which has happened in every country where abortions and the pill were banned or limited.

China has historically been used to the cultural preference for large families, and even today doesn't really have a lot of State-spending on children. As noted above it even punishes families if they're migrant workers. So I think it should try throwing money at the problem first. After all it's had a huge construction and infrastructure boom, where in many cases money was no object. Why not try that on people?

 

[voyager1]

@Mr T , I think you are right on the complexity of the problem.

Here is a rather impressive Reuters article which gathered reaction from people on the ground about this policy. They more or less agree that the 3 child policy wont do much by itself

Excellent article, I recommend to give it a read

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ZHIWEI ZHANG, CHIEF ECONOMIST AT PINPOINT ASSET MANAGEMENT:


"The immediate impact is likely to be positive but small on the macro level. The long term impact depends on if the government can successfully reduce the cost for raising children – particularly education and housing."

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HAO ZHOU, SENIOR ECONOMIST ASIA, COMMERZBANK

"If relaxing the birth policy was effective, the current two-child policy should have proven to be effective too. But who wants to have three kids? Young people could have two kids at most. The fundamental issue is living costs are too high and life pressures are too huge."

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YIFEI LI, SOCIOLOGIST, NYU SHANGHAI

"I feel the proposal fails to recognise the reasons behind the decline in fertility ... People are held back not by the two-children limit, but by the incredibly high costs of raising children in today's China. Housing, extracurricular activities, food, trips, and everything else adds up quickly. An effective policy should have provided more social support and welfare. Raising the limit itself is unlikely to tilt anyone's calculus in a meaningful way, in my view.

"The challenges are so multi-faceted that it requires carefully coordinated actions in multiple policy areas to rebuild people's confidence in the future... It is simply not wise to expect citizens to respond to policy changes so robotically."

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YE LIU, SOCIOLOGIST, KING'S COLLEGE LONDON

"In my view, it is a numbers game. In reality there is still a lack of concrete policy proposals in addressing three main obstacles that put families (in particular women) off from having more children.

"The three obstacles are childcare cost, employment discriminations against women of childbearing and child rearing years and a lack of safeguarding children's welfare in various industries and private childcare providers."

 

[Mr T]

voyager1, great article, thanks. Ye Liu's comment is easily forgotten. In a place like China where your career is very important, discrimination against young women is something else that needs to be addressed. If pregnant women and those who have just given birth are at an enhanced risk of being laid off, demoted or moved sideways, the easiest solution is not to get pregnant in the first place.

 

[Xizor]

Births in 2020 reflect sex in 2019

Not entirely. But certainly ( mid 2019 to mid 2020).

I am cautiously optimistic that the TFR can be replenished ( China still has millions of poor who are not averse to babies ).

 

[Jiang ZeminFanboy]

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1399286176545075200

 

[james smith esq]

Once a society evolves into the Homo economics stage, it’s hard to turn back the clock. And, subsidizing families is fraught with risk as the US “welfare” system has shown. In the US, the system evolved into women having children simply to gain access to subsidies, with little concern for their children’s social, moral, or intellectual development. Many women even under-develop their children, intentionally, in order to gain access to greater “special-educational subsidies. This produced a cycle of women that reproduced simply to get free money, housing, food, and what’s now a multi-generational, permanent dependency class.
China should simply let its citizens make the family-planning decisions that make economic sense to each family and make the best of that process. Increase the breadth and depth of wealth distribution and then see what happens.