- cross-posted to:
- longreads@sh.itjust.works
- cross-posted to:
- longreads@sh.itjust.works
Chinese women have had it. Their response to Beijing’s demands for more children? No.
Fed up with government harassment and wary of the sacrifices of child-rearing, many young women are putting themselves ahead of what Beijing and their families want. Their refusal has set off a crisis for the Communist Party, which desperately needs more babies to rejuvenate China’s aging population.
With the number of babies in free fall—fewer than 10 million were born in 2022, compared with around 16 million in 2012—China is headed toward a demographic collapse. China’s population, now around 1.4 billion, is likely to drop to just around half a billion by 2100, according to some projections. Women are taking the blame.
In October, Chinese Leader Xi Jinping urged the state-backed All-China Women’s Federation to “prevent and resolve risks in the women’s field,” according to an official account of the speech.
“It’s clear that he was not talking about risks faced by women but considering women as a major threat to social stability,” said Clyde Yicheng Wang, an assistant professor of politics at Washington and Lee University who studies Chinese government propaganda.
The State Council, China’s top government body, didn’t respond to questions about Beijing’s population policies.
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China’s problem is a universal problem. They’re “communist” in name only. Their economy has capitalist demands for growth/metastasis, same as ours and most developed economies.
People want to have kids when they can expect those kids to live at minimum the same quality, and preferably better quality, than they themselves did and do. That just isn’t the case anymore as the global economy has run out of massive new sectors for growth/metastasis and has begun eating itself. You can see this in all the entire sectors here merging into monopolies and duopolies. Constant merging isn’t a business strategy, it’s just trying to buy time in a failing economic model.
Capitalism has always been a long-term pyramid scheme to concentrate all the power/wealth/means/capital to a small owner class. The problem is, the con has run out of new places and ways to exploit people as you eventually can’t squeeze more out of a fully exploited stone. No pensions, laughable pay, no future. Just expected to thanklessly generate capital for the owners in larger and larger quantities for the love of what? The nation trying to commoditize your entire life to profit the right people? Why would you bring another poor, desperate child to suffer such a world?
Now, in their desperation, these economies that lead their societies and governments around by the nose are desperately screaming “MORE LIVESTOCK TO EXPLOIT GOD DAMN IT!” because in lieu of not being able to squeeze any harder on existing capital batteries without being correctly told to ‘get fucked,’ that’s all they have.
I firmly believe that is why the federalist society that runs our SCOTUS is trying to get abortion banned, as the most profitable capital batteries are desperate, poor ones. I also believe the intentional decline of our public education system is meant to address the same problem, if they can make the population stoooopid enough not to consider the lives the children of already struggling peasants would have.
This world is finite. Its resources finite. An economic model literally based on infinite continuous growth/metastasis or die is not compatible with the world as it is. In every sense, it is killing us, whether by climate change from without, and loss of actual personal meaning within, at least for the non-winning vast majority. The goal of global economics should have been to establish a sustainable population that could find equilibrium/homeostasis with our shared, COMMUNal environment we all rely on from one breath to the next. Not a lot of room for Super Yachts and private jets in such a world though…
This is why so many ‘industrialists’ are championing Mars bases and asteroid mining. Not because it would solve scarcity, but because it would provide another spatial fix, which like you said, is the ideal capitalist solution.
There was a 1950s radio drama show called X-Minus One that adapted stories from a science fiction magazine. There’s a comedic one that is a surprising critique of capitalism in 1950s America called “Snowball Effect” [spoilers ahead] about an economics professor who comes up with a formula for unlimited growth and tests it out on a small women’s organization in a small town in Wisconsin. It starts working too rapidly, but he has built a flaw into the formula where the organization will quickly collapse if they stop getting new members. But it becomes so successful that the organization takes over the world. At the end of the episode, the world leader (who started as the president of the organization in the tiny Wisconsin town) announces that they are landing the first people on Mars to look for Martians because they desperately needed new members.
If you’re curious to listen, it’s #64 here- https://archive.org/details/OTRR_X_Minus_One_Singles
Humanity divorced itself from nature long before capitalism existed. Without natural bounds on growth, any organism will multiply indefinitely. Every technology we’ve developed, from stone tools and fire to transistors and fractal antennas, has been in service of removing natural bounds. After the world wars, people were concerned about our ability to feed an exploding population, then the green revolution happened. Today, we’re grappling with how to feed 3 to 4 times as many people, as well our depletion of other natural resources and the effect we’re having on the planet as a whole. We’re developing fusion, solar & wind, carbon sequestration, desalination, vertical farming & hydroponics, and the asteroid mining and extraterrestrial colonization you mention.
It’s scary now because it feels like we’re truly on the brink of destroying ourselves - outgrowing our planet’s ability to host us in multiple different ways - without a nascent technology close at hand to save us from ourselves again. We’re smart, but are we smart enough to defeat nature entirely? Either we stay one step ahead of perpetual growth, or we finally realize that perpetual growth is the one natural thing about ourselves that we have not managed to truly grapple with.
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This is also why the Federalist Society is coming after a womens right to vote.
It won’t be long until we hear MTG shouting “All MEN are created equal, not woMEN” in the halls of Congress.
Saving this so I can come back in case you’re right
Exactly I don’t understand how building an economy on screwing over each other is viable… It is present in everything as corporations are running out of metrics to gain income we are seeing either lower quality products on the market, shrinking quantity of consumables or everything becoming subscriber based at ever increasing prices as everything is commodified… If you stop producing you just die.
They’re “communist” in name only.
This despite having 2/3 of the countries GDP in SOEs and 60-90% of the workforce in SOEs, having 5 year plans, and political leadership primarily under a Communist party. Why do so many people think communism is only when everyone makes the same paycheck or when the economy is managed bureaucratically?
That’s just what kids are taught in high school in the US and most people don’t question it. You have to go out of your way to learn otherwise.
Governments and companies have gotten by in the past with a combination of factors:
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Religion pressuring people into marrying and having children.
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Poverty and poor education causing people to have children they weren’t prepared for. Includes lack of access to birth control and discouraging its use.
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One income households made it feasible to raise large families when times were good. The rich have since siphoned off all economic growth while real wages have stagnated.
Having children is an unpaid job. If the government wants people to have children, it should start paying for it. Or, the wealthy will need to stop hoarding all the wealth and let regular people earn enough to support a family on one income again.
In the meantime, people should feel justified and good about not reproducing. The planet is already pushed to its breaking point. More humans will consume more resources and emit more CO2.
I never thought about it like that before. Having children is an unpaid job. So true.
You’re basically expected to produce new workers all at your own expense. And, who benefits? The children you raise become workers and contributors to the economy. So, it’s the capitalists that benefit from increased productivity and growth.
I realize there are other abstract and noble reasons to have children. But, capitalists don’t see it in those terms and there is this economic dimension to childrearing. You should be able to have children if you want them, but you should also be paid for doing so to the extent that it benefits society. I would argue that people were once paid, albeit indirectly through a spouse’s salary that was high enough to support a non-salaried adult to raise the children. Why are people now expected to both work and raise children? Why are they expected to fit this productive activity into their non-working hours as if raising children was a hobby.
Because capitalism is doing unbeatably well in incorporating whatever social movement and then celebrating itself as being “progressive” while just exploiting some valuable aspects of these movements. Sexual liberation? Well you get it back as “freedom” in the form of sexualized advertisement. Feminism? You get it back as women working now basically equally much (but both partners basically earning less in total). Psychedelic drugs that make you question the foundations of our materialistic world? You get it back as micro-dosing to enhance creativity (=productivity). The list goes on, and always will.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Southpark - Canada wants more money!
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Been thinking about this since I got to double digits, how could adding more people solve overpopulation and overconsumption?
Overpopulation isn’t the problem they want to solve. The problem they want to solve is “there are too many of us old people and not enough young people to take care of us”. Since the old people with money aren’t being taken care of, now it’s a problem worth addressing.
This is of course oversimplified, but I don’t think I’m on the wrong track.
Oh you’re bang on, but in my mind I’ve always just kinda “known” I don’t want kids, there’s already too many of us. Obviously that’s since been heavily reinforced based on the science 🔥
You’re not paid in dollars.
That’s not what ‘paid’ means here. I’m a parent. I wouldn’t trade it for anything because of the rewards. But children are very expensive, and if the government expected me to have a kid, I would expect them to cover the costs at the very least.
That’s easy. Just quit working and descend into poverty, then the government will help you maintain that lifestyle.
{UBI peers around the corner}
Buh the welfare queens… Dats socialism
(Bans abortion)
The point is that a lot of folks, even if they would want to can’t, in good conscience, have children because they lack the resources (time or money) to do right by those children.
So to say “just have children already” does nothing for those that aren’t having children. If the society truly feels they have a problem, then they need to address the factors that prevent people from properly raising children. Free services for care and feeding of children, housing for families, labor regulations to make it so parents actually have some flexibility to take care of the needs of their children.
Parenting may be very rewarding but a lot of people who would be appropriately responsible are responsible enough to not inflict a bad childhood when they know they can’t make it work without changes.
In Russia, people with children get benefits that scale really quickly with the number of kids you have. This is, of course, balanced by the fact that Russia is miserable and people seldom wish to stay.
My wife and I are thinking about babies, she would love to stay at home and take care of them but it’s just not that easy to make ends meet.
100%, well said!
I think the issue could be distilled down to the fact that women globally have been forced due to economic factors to choose the workplace over the home. It’s a good idea for women to have equal rights in the workplace, and they should be able to choose a career over a family. But basically, every economy shifted to the point where now you need two average salaries to support a household. This means keeping one parent home to watch the kids is financial suicide for most families.
The results are fewer children, dumber children, and a shittier society. Tax incentives for having kids are a start, but not nearly enough to tip the scales at all.
Spot on.
It sure looks like “the economy” is this massive religious monster that demands nonstop sacrifices for its endless growth. Not immediate sacrifices, mind you, but long and torturous ones. It managed to get a lot of people in line for the sacrifice, it only forgot that pesky part about ensuring they reproduce before dying.
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I have several very close friends who are Chinese. Some from near Shanghai some from near Beijing. The reason they explain is much more cultural and not capitalist as some here suggest.
For one, it is extremely rough on women because young men act very spoiled and men in general have an abusive problem there. So they don’t want to have kids with these men and they don’t want to marry them either. Women are getting married much later with it not being completely unheard of to be 30 and unmarried anymore in China.
Second, it is also hard on women because of family. When they get married the man’s family is their new family essentially and they lose support from their blood family. This can be tough especially if the husbands family hates the woman (not that rare).
Third, divorce is still rare because of the culture of stick through it and be a good wife. Divorce is also hard when you have kids and there’s a lot of pressure to have kids right away when you get married. This is changing but it’s slow.
Finally, we arrive at feminism. This is a good change and women are realizing all the cultural problems and see they can be happier on their own and make big money on their own too. So why get married, why have kids when you can be happy by yourself?
So all in all it’s not bad changes, these are cultural changes most countries go through and I’m happy for the Chinese women and hope all goes well. If you have any questions or want me to elaborate just let me know.
Considering your first point, it might be more effective to train young men in how to be attractive husbands and co-parents than to pressure women to just lay back and think of China.
The capitalism part is culture too. You’re just describing the traditional capitalist practices of treating women like commodities to use as a type of fuckable home appliance. You’re using cultural language to describe commodity trade, inheritance, reproduction of human capital, property ownership, and the fact that only men were “real people” who could own capital.
I understand what you’re saying, but these Chinese cultural aspects go back far further than modern capitalism. At least in china
They are part of trade too. Dowry paid, women as furniture/appliances, trading owners from father to husband. This is all part of the economy in trade and capitalism.
Hence modern capitalism. If trade in general is capitalism then every system is capitalism
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Put women in the workforce but keep the societal expectation of having them do all the housework, child rearing, cooking, cleaning, etc.
Gee I wonder why they don’t want to engage in that social contract anymore, and that doesn’t even cover how fucking expensive it is to even have one kid
From the 1 child policy to this?
I’d imagine a lot of people who were affected negatively by 1 child policy being absolutely pissed at seeing the government suddenly go “we miscalculated, pls start breeding like rabbits”
Yeah there’s an example in the article
There’s a lot of crazy things in China that are related to this. Not just one child policy. There’s a whole crisis of sexuality in China.
Do you have an article on that? I always think of Japan with that issue, or do I have that mixed up?
I think a lot of countries are having similar issues. I think South Korea is another one.
Hell, even most western countries have the same issues
But many of those same western countries level out the population decay with immigration. To my knowledge South Korea, Japan, and China don’t have as much immigration.
Well there aren’t enough women because men are obsessed with family lines. Having one child. A male child was the preference, and in China older women are undesirable so I can see why there is a problem.
That keeps getting cited in western media, but it’s really not the case. The obsession with bloodlines is true; however it is illegal here (I live in China, my wife is Chinese) to reveal the gender prior to birth; and punished severely. It’s still possible to find a doctor and bribe them, however the risk is so high that not many are able to pay up. I’ve heard numbers of up to 30k USD (!) going around (and that’s in today’s money), which is easily 2-3x the annual salary of a local worker.
So while the top ~10% or something could have afforded it, it was in fact much easier to just have a second kid and just hide it with some relatives in a village who’d pretend it was theirs. All the good it did to enforce the one child policy was to have a ton of unaccounted offspring running around in the countryside.
Current statistics show that 48.99% of Chinese are female vs. 51.01% male, while the global statistic is 50.49% male vs. 49.51% female. (That’s the global figure including China, so it’s a bit distorted, but not by a huge margin).
TL;DR: While there are a bit fewer women in China than the global average, it’s not really a relevant concern.
Interesting.
Honestly kind of happy for China for a change, this is a pretty big indication of women’s rights that they’re able to say No to begin with. I hope they continue to resist and eventually cause a larger change for the better across the region.
I hope they continue to resist and eventually cause a larger change for the better across the region.
Except that’s not what’s happening if you read the article, on either count.
Women aren’t resisting childbirth as an act of rebellion or as an exercise of their rights, there’s just too many competing pressures in their lives to table in having kids. Coupled with declining rates of attachment and a distraction-based economy, this isn’t a ‘win’ for anyone.
And population decline is a crisis we don’t know how to deal with. Old people have little economic output, but use up a lot of resources. It means the kids who are still born end up carrying a huge burden paying for and caring for older generations, they end up tax serfs in an aged care-based economy, and if older generations aren’t cared for you end up with human atrocities on a massive scale.
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Most of these comments are problematic. You don’t have to have children, but for most people it has been a pretty consistent and natural inclination. Now a whole generation are convincing themselves they don’t want children when they really just can’t, and rather than holding those responsible to account and improving all our circumstances, they’re treating it as some personal victory.
distraction-based economy
So true. More and more I’ve come to the realization that the ideal serving class is one that’s constantly distracted from their lives. You have a medium screen, a little screen, and a big screen, and the majority of us spend just about all day on them. The amount of ‘content’ to view and absorb is an ever growing behemoth that demands attention. You didn’t see the latest show/movie/tweet/tik-tok/sensationalized news story?? Then how are you going to relate to people who do??
with the advent of streaming services, I used to say this was the golden age of television, but really we’re just reached peak content. It’s all bread and circus, except they discovered they don’t even need the bread anymore. They don’t need to pay you enough for you to be fed and entertained, now it’s just enough that you have a screen with access to wifi.
A distracted worker doesn’t revolt. A distracted populace doesn’t concern themselves with the boring business of governing. A distracted nation doesn’t care about foundational societal issues like wealth inequality when there’s a new war every 6 months to have an opinion about. We’re so concerned with having an opinion that we forget to act on them.
Now here comes old money with their new problem, there aren’t going to be enough people to take advantage of in the future! who will they spit on with contempt, throw nickles at, and pay with experience? have more babies! they demand. because how else can they endlessly grow their wealth (and opinion of themselves) when there isn’t endless people to take advantage of?
Of course, all of us understand that endless growth of an organism destroys it’s host. Just like cancer, there’s just more and more of us, metastasized to ever region of the globe, into every niche pocket of despair we’re afforded by the circumstances of our birth. Our host is dying, and the ruling class says “keep growing, I’m not satisfied yet!” demanding we grow into our own destruction, solely for the ego of those who will be dead long before our collective death spiral concludes.
I’m thinking of starting a go fund me for a series of billboards that say only this:
“won’t someone rid us of these troublesome billionaires?”
Interesting points. Although endless growth may still continue, because eventually robots will be more affordable than human workers. Not because robots become cheaper, but because humans are more expensive.
I’m not some pie-in-the-sky future nut. I know the main issue is the short term problems. Like what do we do for the unemployed worker who can’t afford somewhere to live and has no investments? How can we deal with negative externalities like pollution and climate change?
These are the real challenges. Robots that talk to you and perform tasks are easy by comparison.
Population decline is the opposite of a crisis. The whole economy can fuck right off, entire regions can become abandoned, it would still be a massive win to cut the total human population in half twice.
Any time someone calls “crisis” I always ask “crisis for whom?”
Our parents
That’s a possible answer, frequently cited by advocates of endless population growth. History is certainly rife with prioritization of economy over people, so it’s an easy place to land.
I mean unless everyone who owns the means of production surrendered them to the commons, then I don’t see how it’s a wrong answer. We certainly don’t need to be putting in as much labor as we do.
It says a lot about where we’re at in humanity. Child-bearing-aged humans the world over want children less than ever before.
Something’s fucking wrong.
Wrong? I see people deciding not to have kids as fundamentally a good thing. Coercion into having kids due to government pressure or social norms seems a whole lot more wrong to me. It’s ok to not want kids, it’s not some sort of disorder that needs fixing.
I would absolutely love to see the population go down, even for like a single day, within my lifetime. But considering we’ve added over 2 billion people to the population since I was a kid…I don’t have high hopes.
Coercion into having kids due to government pressure or social norms seems a whole lot more wrong to me.
as someone who does not want kids and is constantly being pressured into it by inlaws, thank you for saying this. Every time i see my screaming, trantrum throwing nephews my belief is more reinforced.
Yes, I think the person you replied to meant exactly what you put in words- they just left it vague to accommodate for all the other factors involved not only in the Chinese case at hand, but worldwide. I don’t think they meant to say it’s not ok to not want to have kids.
Better for the environment for sure, but less people would leave many countries bankrupt because of high senior care costs. I mean, they could just allow immigration, but that’s not gonna happen. It’s funny how the US benefits so much from immigration and yet half the country doesn’t want it
Which is basically an accounting issue. We could produce all the stuff we need with a smaller workforce, but that would squeeze a lot of profit out of the production system. Simply put billionaires would suffer. Without an ever increasing consumer population there is the horror of degrowth.
I don’t think we can and I think the ongoing labor shortage is proof of it. At least not yet, but with advances in automation and robotics, then I think it’s likely. Also we totally need something like a UBI at that point because we would surely tip the scales towards labor surplus at that point. Which is where I would like to see municipal programs pop up around the country to employ people and pay them really well to clean up the environment. Plant trees, clean up rivers, basically rehab the planet. It’s all wishful thinking but I like talking about it lol
I hope when I’m old they just decide to let my generation suffer to correct this fundamentally flawed system that will inevitably collapse at some point. It’s based upon the impossible notion of infinite growth.
I totally agree with you about immigration, but I tend to look at the population issue from a world wide perspective. And from that perspective the population goes up every single year without fail, which to me is a major problem that I hope our species will find a way to overcome.
They’ve been telling Gen X and younger that we’re going to suffer when old since we were kids.
Humanity has always taken an idea and ran with it to the breaking point and beyond, having it fall apart, take the pieces that worked and cobble together a few new idea to run with usually accompanied with a new batch of religions and cultures. But living in that falling apart time isn’t the greatest experience.
Yeah, the way we have human society set up.
I think low birth rates are a product of a demanding system. In many cases it’s economic suicide to even entertain the idea of having children.
There is also the fact that the economy is collapsing in on itself since companies are pulling out of China in droves. It is a toxic business environment, ever since Trump’s presidency has ignited this whole nationalism tend among world politics things have been going downhill for younger generations it is like being a US citizen, and graduating in 2008 Imagine graduating with a degree, and there are no jobs available.
Ah yes, “a threat to be eliminated” is surely a stance that will get women on board with child-bearing.
The allure of DINKs and solo living is too strong even when developed countries started to get really developed earlier on.
DINK life is fantastic!
DINK?
Edit: Ah, Dual Income No Kids!
Wait… Wait wait wait…
Mr. and Mrs. Dink, from the 90s cartoon ‘Doug’… Was that deliberate or a coincidence!?
Deliberate. They were suppose to come across as materialistic because they chose toys over kids. Also, they were always inviting Doug over, as if they regretted not having kids.
Very expensive
Correct!!
Yeah, it’s really no wonder many are choosing not to have kids these days. It’s insanely expensive and inconvenient and governments do very little to make it financially attractive. At least in the US.
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China could probably stand to spend some time not having an extremely strong stance on babies.
Why would anyone want kids while they can’t afford anything with no kids? If they want people to have kids, they better help them financially. You can’t have a child and leave them for strangers to raise them at daycares. Or have the mother sit home and the dad works 3 jobs to put food on the table. Fuck that.
The latter is how we do it. 💀
And it shouldn’t be that way. A human being doesn’t need to work 3 jobs to just fucking survive. I have worked 3 jobs and it sucked. I went months without seeing my son while he is awake, I left home while he was asleep and came back while he’s asleep. It was brutal.
As we all have known for a while now, capitalism has failed us. This is end game capitalism
Russia is the same. Nobody wants to immigrate to those countries. Wonder why.
Not entirely true! Tara Reade moved to Russia recently. Totally helps her credibility. Nothing fishy with that timing!
I don’t know about Russia, but in china and east asia I’m pretty sure the bigger problem is that they limit immigration.
China’s population, now around 1.4 billion, is likely to drop to just around half a billion by 2100, according to some projections. Women are taking the blame.
It does take two to tango.
Estimating the fuck-rate of my grandchildren’s grandchildren and being very concerned in a paper that can’t predict the next quarterly financial cycle correctly.
Loving this child free wave
