The Ministry of the Interior is offering a reward of NT$1 million to anyone who can come up with a slogan that would make people more willing to have children. While this may be a well-intended idea, the fundamental solution to this problem would be to actively search for answers as to why Taiwanese decide not to have children.
Negative factors such as a sluggish economy, political tensions, problems in the education system and the gradual degradation of the environment have contributed to a fear of having children.
Also, Taiwanese society is not very friendly to women.
On the surface, women’s rights in Taiwan are no less than in other dweveloped countries, and Taiwanese women are among the most highly educated in Asia. However, on closer inspection, it is easy to see that women are still restricted by traditional attitudes that limit their right to work and have a major influence on the choices they can make about giving birth.
For example, while the government has set up a system to subsidize women taking unpaid leave to care for their infants, the many restrictions placed on working women in the past mean that they are still unable to have children and care for them without having to worry about their jobs. In interviews, most employed women say that while the government’s policies are good, they still worry about losing their jobs.
If employers cannot ensure the rights of female employees to have children, the willingness to have children will probably continue to drop.
Second, the government has been promoting gender equality for years. The policy has been effective to some extent and women have gradually managed to cast off past stereotypes of women as housewives and they are now competing with men in the workplace.
However, the traditional view that men should work and women stay at home remains deeply ingrained in people’s minds and the view in many families is still that women are predestined to look after children.
Many career women have to do housework when they get home from work, prepare meals, wash clothes, look after their children and help them with homework while the husband sits around and relaxes, at most doing a token chore. Obviously, if we want to increase the willingness of women to have children, men must learn to share the housework and be gentler and more considerate.
Another backward concept that keeps women from having children is the view that boys are more important than girls. As the quality of the education system has improved, education has become a very expensive project that causes the average couple to worry about having too many children. However, the older generation still thinks a boy is needed to continue the family line and some even think more children and grandchildren will bring greater luck. Therefore, women are often pressured to bear a boy or a few more children before “it is enough.”
Having children has thus become an endless nightmare that scares many women away from marriage.
Is it so strange, then, that the fertility rate keeps falling?
Our culture still holds many prejudices against women. As soon as women are able to resist these prejudices, they will stop playing along. If I were a woman, I would not want to have a family, unless these old cultural habits were eradicated. Instead of coming up with slogans, the ministry must find ways of creating an environment that is friendlier to women and that will let them feel that motherhood is a happy and rewarding experience.
Hsu Yu-fang is an associate professor and chairman of the department of Chinese at National Dong Hwa University.
TRANSLATED BY DREW CAMERON
The conflict in the Middle East has been disrupting financial markets, raising concerns about rising inflationary pressures and global economic growth. One market that some investors are particularly worried about has not been heavily covered in the news: the private credit market. Even before the joint US-Israeli attacks on Iran on Feb. 28, global capital markets had faced growing structural pressure — the deteriorating funding conditions in the private credit market. The private credit market is where companies borrow funds directly from nonbank financial institutions such as asset management companies, insurance companies and private lending platforms. Its popularity has risen since
The Donald Trump administration’s approach to China broadly, and to cross-Strait relations in particular, remains a conundrum. The 2025 US National Security Strategy prioritized the defense of Taiwan in a way that surprised some observers of the Trump administration: “Deterring a conflict over Taiwan, ideally by preserving military overmatch, is a priority.” Two months later, Taiwan went entirely unmentioned in the US National Defense Strategy, as did military overmatch vis-a-vis China, giving renewed cause for concern. How to interpret these varying statements remains an open question. In both documents, the Indo-Pacific is listed as a second priority behind homeland defense and
Every analyst watching Iran’s succession crisis is asking who would replace supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Yet, the real question is whether China has learned enough from the Persian Gulf to survive a war over Taiwan. Beijing purchases roughly 90 percent of Iran’s exported crude — some 1.61 million barrels per day last year — and holds a US$400 billion, 25-year cooperation agreement binding it to Tehran’s stability. However, this is not simply the story of a patron protecting an investment. China has spent years engineering a sanctions-evasion architecture that was never really about Iran — it was about Taiwan. The
In an op-ed published in Foreign Affairs on Tuesday, Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairwoman Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) said that Taiwan should not have to choose between aligning with Beijing or Washington, and advocated for cooperation with Beijing under the so-called “1992 consensus” as a form of “strategic ambiguity.” However, Cheng has either misunderstood the geopolitical reality and chosen appeasement, or is trying to fool an international audience with her doublespeak; nonetheless, it risks sending the wrong message to Taiwan’s democratic allies and partners. Cheng stressed that “Taiwan does not have to choose,” as while Beijing and Washington compete, Taiwan is strongest when
RSS