Concerned by China’s shrinking population, political advisers to the government have come up with more than 20 recommendations to boost the nation’s birthrate, although experts say the best they can do is to slow the population’s decline.
China dug itself into a demographic hole largely through its one-child policy imposed between 1980 and 2015. Authorities raised the limit to three in 2021, but even when people were stuck at home during COVID-19 couples have been reluctant to have babies.
Young people cite high childcare and education costs, low incomes, a feeble social safety net and gender inequalities as discouraging factors.
Photo: EPA-EFE
The proposals to boost the birthrate, made at the annual meeting of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) this month, range from subsidies for families raising their first child, rather than just the second and third, to expanding free public education and improving access to fertility treatments.
Experts took the sheer number of proposals as a positive sign that China was treating its aging and declining demographics with urgency, after data showed the population shrinking for the first time in six decades last year.
“You cannot change the declining trend, but without any fertility encouragement policy then fertility will decline even further,” said Peng Xiujian (彭秀健), senior research fellow at the Centre of Policy Studies at Victoria University in Australia.
A motion by CPPCC member Jiang Shengnan (蔣勝男) that young people work only eight hours per day so that they have time to “fall in love, get married and have children,” is critical to ensure women are not overworked, Peng said.
Giving incentives to have a first child could encourage couples to have at least one child, she said. Many provinces only subsidize second and third children.
China’s birthrate last year fell to 6.77 births per 1,000 people, from 7.52 births in 2021, the lowest on record.
Experts also praised a proposal to scrap all family planning measures, including the three children limit and the requirement for women to be legally married to register their children.
Financial incentives are not enough and policies focusing on gender equality and better employment rights for women would likely have more of an effect, London School of Economics and Political Science associate professor Arjan Gjonca said.
CPPCC proposals such as maternity leave paid by the government rather than the employer would help reduce discrimination against women, while increasing paternity leave would remove a barrier so that fathers could take on more parenting responsibilities, experts said.
Demographer Yi Fuxian (易富賢) was skeptical about the measures, saying that China needs a “paradigm revolution of its entire economy, society, politics and diplomacy to boost fertility.”
Apps and Web sites that use artificial intelligence (AI) to undress women in photos are soaring in popularity, researchers said. In September alone, 24 million people visited undressing Web sites, the social network analysis company Graphika said. Many of these undressing, or “nudify,” services use popular social networks for marketing, Graphika said. For instance, since the beginning of this year, the number of links advertising undressing apps increased more than 2,400 percent on social media, including on X and Reddit, the researchers said. The services use AI to recreate an image so that the person is nude. Many of the services only
IN ABSOLUTE CONTROL: About 80 percent of Russians approve of Putin, a survey shows, but that might be misleading due to his intolerance to criticism Russian President Vladimir Putin on Friday moved to prolong his repressive and unyielding grip on Russia for at least another six years, announcing his candidacy in the presidential election in March that he is all but certain to win. Putin still commands wide support after nearly a quarter-century in power, despite starting an immensely costly war in Ukraine that has taken thousands of his people’s lives, provoked repeated attacks inside Russia — including one on the Kremlin itself — and corroded its aura of invincibility. A short-lived rebellion in June by mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin raised widespread speculation that Putin could be
JUMPING BAIL: The democracy advocate said made the decision after ‘considering the situation in Hong Kong, my personal safety, my physical and mental health’ Hong Kong pro-democracy activist Agnes Chow (周庭), who was jailed over her role in massive 2019 protests, on Sunday said she had moved to Canada and would not return to meet her bail conditions. Chow was one of the best-known young faces of the 2012, 2014 and 2019 protest movements against Beijing’s increasingly authoritarian rule in Hong Kong. She spent about seven months behind bars for her role in a protest outside Hong Kong police headquarters in 2019, when huge crowds rallied week after week in the most serious challenge to China’s rule since Hong Kong’s 1997 handover. On Sunday
TAKING STOCK: It was not yet clear how damaging the espionage, dating to 1981, has been, as authorities are still assessing the situation, the State Department said A former US ambassador to Bolivia has been arrested and charged with spying for Cuba over a 40-year span, the US Department of Justice announced on Monday, detailing a shock betrayal by a suspect who called the US “the enemy.” US Attorney General Merrick Garland laid out the allegations against Victor Manuel Rocha, a onetime member of the White House’s National Security Council now accused of using his positions within the government to support Cuba’s “clandestine intelligence-gathering mission” against the US. The charges against Rocha, 73, expose “one of the highest-reaching and longest-lasting infiltrations of the United States government by a foreign
RSS