The percentage of adults living with their parents in Taiwan and China has been declining steadily, but numbers in both countries remain higher than in the US, a leading economist said yesterday.
Cyrus Chu (朱敬一), an academic at Academia Sinica, said in a speech delivered at National Taiwan University that more than 60 percent of adults lived together with their parents in China in the 1990s, compared with 50 percent in Taiwan and 40 percent in the US.
According to the findings of a study, Chu said that the average number of people per family had dropped on both sides of the Taiwan Strait, from slightly more than four two decades ago to approximately three today.
Help wanted
In his view, Chu said that many of those who chose to live together with their parents were not necessarily doing so because of filial piety, but rather because they needed their parents' assistance in caring for young children, particularly those aged under three.
"Studies have shown that adults tend to become less willing to live with their parents when their income increases," Chu said, adding that daughters-in-law tend not to be inclined to live with their parents-in-law when their incomes are sufficient.
According to Chu, sons-in-law also tend to be less willing to live with their parents-in-law if they have a high income.
In Taiwan, Chu said, the parental preference for sons over daughters has been declining, with the percentage of those wanting boys falling from 68 percent to 46 percent according to a series of studies.
A similar trend is also seen in China, Chu said without elaborating further.
Getting older
Chu added that the average age of women giving birth for the first time was steadily increasing in both Taiwan and China.
In one of Chu's studies, 17 percent of all children born in China were born to mothers aged over 30, with the figure in Taiwan being 48 percent.
Chu's research also discovered that parents in the US do not usually pass all of their assets or property on to their children before their death because, if they did, their children may no longer choose to visit them regularly.
In the US, he said, the richer the parents, the more frequently their children come back to see them.
Chu said that in Taiwan the frequency of children visiting their parents tends to remain high or even become higher after their parents pass their assets to their children.
This phenomenon is probably related to pressure from siblings and society, he explained.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching