Some Chinese provinces are giving young newlyweds 30 days of paid leave in the hope of encouraging marriage and boosting a flagging birthrate, the state-run People’s Daily Health said on Tuesday.
China’s minimum paid marriage leave is three days, but provinces have been able to set their own more generous allowances starting this month.
The northwestern province of Gansu and coal-producing Shanxi Province now give 30 days, while Shanghai gives 10 and Sichuan Province still only three, the People’s Daily Health said.
Photo: EPA-EFE
“Extending marriage leave is one of the effective ways of increasing the fertility rate,” Yang Haiyang (楊海洋), dean of the Social Development Research Institute of Southwestern University of Finance and Economics, was quoted as saying.
“The extension of marriage leave is mainly in some provinces and cities with relatively slow economic development,” he said, adding that there was an urgent need to both expand the labor force and stimulate consumption.
A host of other supporting policies are still needed, including housing subsidies and paid paternity leave for men, he said.
China’s population fell last year for the first time in six decades, official data showed — a turning point that is expected to mark the start of a long period of decline.
Last year, China recorded its lowest ever birthrate, of 6.77 births per 1,000 people.
Much of the downturn is the result of a “one child” policy imposed from 1980 to 2015, and a surge in education costs that has put many Chinese off having more than one child, or even having any at all.
POLITICAL PRISONERS VS DEPORTEES: Venezuela’s prosecutor’s office slammed the call by El Salvador’s leader, accusing him of crimes against humanity Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on Sunday proposed carrying out a prisoner swap with Venezuela, suggesting he would exchange Venezuelan deportees from the US his government has kept imprisoned for what he called “political prisoners” in Venezuela. In a post on X, directed at Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Bukele listed off a number of family members of high-level opposition figures in Venezuela, journalists and activists detained during the South American government’s electoral crackdown last year. “The only reason they are imprisoned is for having opposed you and your electoral fraud,” he wrote to Maduro. “However, I want to propose a humanitarian agreement that
ECONOMIC WORRIES: The ruling PAP faces voters amid concerns that the city-state faces the possibility of a recession and job losses amid Washington’s tariffs Singapore yesterday finalized contestants for its general election on Saturday next week, with the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) fielding 32 new candidates in the biggest refresh of the party that has ruled the city-state since independence in 1965. The move follows a pledge by Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財), who took office last year and assumed the PAP leadership, to “bring in new blood, new ideas and new energy” to steer the country of 6 million people. His latest shake-up beats that of predecessors Lee Hsien Loong (李顯龍) and Goh Chok Tong (吳作棟), who replaced 24 and 11 politicians respectively
Archeologists in Peru on Thursday said they found the 5,000-year-old remains of a noblewoman at the sacred city of Caral, revealing the important role played by women in the oldest center of civilization in the Americas. “What has been discovered corresponds to a woman who apparently had elevated status, an elite woman,” archeologist David Palomino said. The mummy was found in Aspero, a sacred site within the city of Caral that was a garbage dump for more than 30 years until becoming an archeological site in the 1990s. Palomino said the carefully preserved remains, dating to 3,000BC, contained skin, part of the
Young women standing idly around a park in Tokyo’s west suggest that a giant statue of Godzilla is not the only attraction for a record number of foreign tourists. Their faces lit by the cold glow of their phones, the women lining Okubo Park are evidence that sex tourism has developed as a dark flipside to the bustling Kabukicho nightlife district. Increasing numbers of foreign men are flocking to the area after seeing videos on social media. One of the women said that the area near Kabukicho, where Godzilla rumbles and belches smoke atop a cinema, has become a “real