Latest news with #One-ChildPolicy
&w=3840&q=100)
Business Standard
13 hours ago
- Politics
- Business Standard
Women see reversal of China's one-child policy as more state pressure
Private Revolutions: Coming of Age in a New China Published by Bloomsbury 320 pages ₹599 For anyone trying to understand China behind the headlines and the propaganda, Private Revolutions: Coming of Age in a New China is an important read. It provides a people's perspective of how Chinese society has evolved since economic reform and the manner in which the policies of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) have impacted Chinese women in particular. The book is an attempt to present the story and idea of China beyond the CCP and through the lens of the Chinese people. The word revolution is also aptly used in the title underscoring how the word can mean different things to different sections of society and the Party. According to the author, 'This book is about revolutions in two senses. It is about China's economic revolution from the 1980s and 1990s onwards, after the Reform and Opening Up era…. It is also about the personal revolutions undertaken by four young women born in those decades as they came of age amid the inconsistent rise — and now stumble — of social mobility in China's capitalist era'. Women pay the highest price in any revolution and China is no different. Though Mao Zedong did famously proclaim, 'Women hold up half the sky', Chinese society does not reflect this outlook in any meaningful way. China is inherently patriarchal; for proof, one need look no further than the gender composition of the Chinese Politburo Standing Committee. Even initiatives such as the 'One-Child Policy' have been aimed at directing and controlling women's agency over their bodies. This coupled with the preference for a male child has consistently aggravated the intensity of inequality within Chinese society. The modification of the one-child policy to a two-child policy in 2016 and to a three-child policy in 2021 directly impacts the lives of Chinese women. These changes were driven primarily because of decreasing birth rates. She describes how Chinese women responded: 'Rather than being seen as a permission to have more children, everyone saw it as a sign of looming government pressure on women to rescue the country's plummeting birth rate'. There is no denying that Chinese society has seen enormous changes since economic reform. Large swathes of the population were lifted out of poverty, compulsory primary education ensured a high degree of literacy, urbanisation has been swift, and the country is an economic and military powerhouse. What gets lost in this big upbeat picture is the people. How have their lives been impacted? Can data be the only measure of success? For instance, the author shrewdly offers a take on how Chinese women approach the issue of using make-up. She highlights how using makeup is linked to the notions of being feudal and the 'fact that the party had later denounced wearing makeup as a bourgeois fashion'. But equally, a decision to apply makeup can also be considered revolutionary. The book skilfully juxtaposes the lives of four 'ordinary' women since their birth to their adult lives. It also paints a picture of how the policies adopted and implemented by the Party impacts each one of them differently and yet similarly, and underscores why the major challenges that the Chinese society faces today cannot be addressed by top-down policy changes. These policies primarily represent what the Party needs at any given point of time to survive and gain legitimacy. But these policies have also failed to address the real challenges. What China needs is a major revisit of the hukou system, the healthcare system, the insurance system, and child care and education system. The book details that, 'by the mid-2010s, government figures suggested that there were 13 million people without any kind of hukou, of whom 8 million had been children outside their parents' birth quotas'. It also highlights the challenges migrant workers face today, the same workers who have played a crucial role in China's economic revolution. This is not just a book about four lives; it is about how these women adapt to the changes around them. How they try to understand the lives of their parents and their children while understanding themselves. How they all define a purpose for themselves while making the most of the limitations and challenges. The book also shows how feudal, Marxist and capitalist structures coexist in China today. It provides a nuanced and novel context for what is a revolution in today's China. And that can be a small decision, something as simple as expressing your own opinions and deciding what kind of life you want to live. The reviewer is associate professor, O P Jindal Global University
Yahoo
05-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Opinion - Why government incentives won't boost the birth rate
The White House is reportedly putting together a menu of policies designed to reverse the decades-long decline in U.S. births. This is hardly news, given all of the public comments administration officials have made about low fertility. It puts the U.S. on track with a growing swath of pronatalist governments around the world who are frustrated that their version of an ideal population eludes them, year after year. The new policies could end up providing some welcome financial support for families, but there's a near certainty that they won't result in the birth rates the administration desires. That's because there's a truth proven time and again, which policymakers have largely failed to accept: governments are not the driving force behind individual decisions over whether or how many children to have. They've always played at most a supporting role, even when fertility rates were high, and their ability to raise the rates in a low-fertility world is limited. The stubborn belief that an 'ideal' population is possible with just the right mix of policies is doing more than simply frustrating policymakers — it's putting reproductive rights at risk, lowering fertility rates, and wasting time and money better spent adjusting to the new reality of an aging world. Powerful people hyperfixating on births is nothing new. In post-World World II Asia, for example, leaders looking to rebuild their war-torn countries believed the key to a better future was a population ideal in size, age structure and ethnic composition. Worried about too many mouths to feed, they put all their efforts into policies that would turn down fertility rates — work they're scrambling to undo today. But countries that didn't enact such policies also saw birth rates fall, meaning that, to a great extent, these declines were inevitable as contraception and abortion became ubiquitous, education improved, and preferences about family size shifted. Governments may have sped things up, but they weren't the puppet masters of population. And one thing is certain: coercion wasn't necessary. Take the natural experiment of mainland China versus Taiwan. Sure, China's One-Child Policy played a role in lowering births. But neighboring Taiwan, with no such coercive policy, saw even more dramatic declines, becoming one of the few countries in the world to see a fertility rate below one child per woman, an unprecedented level in Western contexts. In fact, China was the last country in the region to see fertility fall below replacement level. Chinese individuals and couples began to limit their own family sizes before the One Child Policy and have continued to do so since it was discontinued, much to the government's chagrin. It turns out that cultural and economic factors have a strong influence over marriage and birth trends. Governments are facing that head on as they now try to raise birth rates through policy. I was recently on a radio show where one LA caller said she and her partner would want $50,000 from the government to start a family. Most countries don't come close to that. Hungary's policies are more lucrative than most, but the fertility rate there is still lower than that in the U.S., and Hungarian births this year are already down compared to last year. Does all this mean the government should just be on standby? Absolutely not — there's a tremendous role for government in setting the normative and policy environment conducive for population changes. That's why getting governments to address these issues in a constructive way matters. When leaders are convinced that lower fertility rates are in the country's best interest, for example, they can initiate or accelerate progress by making family planning available, expanding education, and improving economic opportunities, particularly for women. When they're convinced otherwise, they can shut all of these positive measures down. Just look at Tanzania, where former president John Magufuli, convinced that the country needed more babies to be prosperous, urged people to stop using birth control. Today, Tanzania has one of the highest fertility rates in the world, at 4.8 children per woman on average, and its rapid population growth is creating tremendous strains. Or look at the opposite end of the spectrum, South Korea, where leaders mandated parental leave as an antidote to the tremendous inequality in care work between women and men, which they believe is part of what's driving the country's record-low births. The problem was they couldn't make people use it. As a result, only 22 percent of mothers and 5 percent of fathers take leave after a birth. Norms clearly matter. Governments shouldn't expect full control over population, but they need not throw the baby out with the bathwater. Leaders should consider a range of policy options to help women, couples and families achieve their reproductive goals, including access to high-quality family planning services as well as assisted reproductive technology. Helping families have adequate resources is still a good thing. While cash bonuses, for example, aren't enough to seal the deal for young and fertile couples, extra cash can help households make it from one paycheck to the next, and give parents more resources to invest in the one or two children they do have. Governments are not the only actors who can help here. There's clearly a role for the private sector in making working environments conducive for parenting and for civil society, too, in creating supportive communities for all ages to flourish. Getting bureaucrats to have realistic expectations about their role in the bedroom is crucial, as we are at a pivotal moment where obsession with turning the dial on population puts contraceptive access and reproductive rights at risk. This era of population alarm is a direct echo of the overpopulation panic of the 1960s and '70s. That one too often resulted in a curtailing of individual rights to meet population targets through forced sterilizations and other coercive means. It's true that births went up in U.S. counties where abortion was most restricted, but there is a steep price to pay in higher maternal mortality and poverty. Elites in low-fertility societies who are panicked about the economic effects of population aging have been pursuing a strategy of asking women to birth more, work more and care more — policies so contradictory that the approach is doomed to fail and leave women even worse off. Pushing women into the workforce, particularly mothers, without attendant structures to help them with care responsibilities just trades one problem for another. Women shouldn't have to choose between working, caregiving and reproductive autonomy, but that's exactly what will happen until policymakers start focusing on resilience instead of population targets. Jennifer D. Sciubba, Ph.D., is president and CEO of the Population Reference Bureau in Washington, D.C., and the author of '8 Billion and Counting: How Sex, Death, and Migration Shape Our World.' She discusses low fertility and its implications in her 2023 TED Talk, 'The Truth About Human Population Decline,' and on 'The Ezra Klein Show'in March 2024. Sciubba is the author of the forthcoming book, 'Toxic Demography: Ideology and the Politics of Population.' Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
The Hill
05-05-2025
- Politics
- The Hill
Why government incentives won't boost the birth rate
The White House is reportedly putting together a menu of policies designed to reverse the decades-long decline in U.S. births. This is hardly news, given all of the public comments administration officials have made about low fertility. It puts the U.S. on track with a growing swath of pronatalist governments around the world who are frustrated that their version of an ideal population eludes them, year after year. The new policies could end up providing some welcome financial support for families, but there's a near certainty that they won't result in the birth rates the administration desires. That's because there's a harsh truth none of these governments have yet grasped: Governments do not control whether or how many children people have. They always played at most a supporting role, even when fertility rates were high, and their ability to raise the rates in a low-fertility world is limited. The stubborn belief that an ideal population is possible with just the right mix of policies is doing more than simply frustrating policymakers — it's putting reproductive rights at risk, lowering fertility rates, and wasting time and money better spent adjusting to the new reality of an aging world. Powerful people hyperfixating on births is nothing new. In post-World World II Asia, for example, leaders looking to rebuild their war-torn countries believed the key to a better future was a population ideal in size, age structure and ethnic composition. Worried about too many mouths to feed, they put all their efforts into policies that would turn down fertility rates — work they're scrambling to undo today. But countries that didn't enact such policies also saw birth rates fall, meaning that, to a great extent, these declines were inevitable as contraception and abortion became ubiquitous, education improved, and preferences about family size shifted. Governments may have sped things up, but they weren't the puppet masters of population. And one thing is certain: coercion wasn't necessary. Take the natural experiment of mainland China versus Taiwan. Sure, China's One-Child Policy played a role in lowering births. But neighboring Taiwan, with no such coercive policy, saw even more dramatic declines, becoming one of the few countries in the world to see a fertility rate below one child per woman, an unprecedented level in Western contexts. In fact, China was the last country in the region to see fertility fall below replacement level. Chinese individuals and couples began to limit their own family sizes before the One Child Policy and have continued to do so since it was discontinued, much to the government's chagrin. It turns out that cultural and economic factors have a strong influence over marriage and birth trends. Governments are facing that head on as they now try to raise birth rates through policy. I was recently on a radio show where one LA caller said she and her partner would want $50,000 from the government to start a family. Most countries don't come close to that. Hungary's policies are more lucrative than most, but the fertility rate there is still lower than that in the U.S., and Hungarian births this year are already down compared to last year. Does all this mean the government should just be on standby? Absolutely not — there's a tremendous role for government in setting the normative and policy environment conducive for population changes. That's why getting governments to address these issues in the right way matters. When leaders are convinced that lower fertility rates are in the country's best interest, they can initiate or accelerate progress by making family planning available, expanding education, and improving economic opportunities, particularly for women. When they're convinced otherwise, they can shut it all down. Just look at Tanzania, where former president John Magufuli, convinced that the country needed more babies to be prosperous, told people to stop using birth control. Today, Tanzania has one of the highest fertility rates in the world, at 4.8 children per woman on average. Or look at the opposite end of the spectrum, South Korea, where leaders mandated parental leave as an antidote to the tremendous inequality in care work between women and men, which they believe is part of what's driving the country's record-low births. The problem was they couldn't make people use it. As a result, only 22 percent of mothers and 5 percent of fathers take leave after a birth. Norms clearly matter. Yet even in egalitarian Sweden, where it's taboo for dads to skip parental leave, the fertility rate is just 1.5 children per woman — lower than in the U.S., which has no law requiring paid parental leave (and less cultural pressure on dads to take time off). Governments shouldn't expect full control over population, but they need not throw the baby out with the bathwater. Helping families have adequate resources is still a good thing. While cash bonuses, for example, aren't enough to seal the deal for young and fertile couples, extra cash can help households make it from one paycheck to the next, and give parents more resources to invest in the one or two children they do have. Governments are not the only actors who can help here. There's clearly a role for the private sector in making working environments conducive for parenting and for civil society, too, in creating supportive communities for all ages to flourish. Getting bureaucrats to have realistic expectations about their role in the bedroom is crucial, as we are at a pivotal moment where obsession with turning the dial on population puts contraceptive access and reproductive rights at risk. This era of population alarm is a direct echo of the overpopulation panic of the 1960s and '70s. That one too often resulted in a curtailing of individual rights to meet population targets through forced sterilizations and other coercive means. It's true that births went up in U.S. counties where abortion was most restricted, but there is a steep price to pay in higher maternal mortality and poverty. Elites in low-fertility societies who are panicked about the economic effects of population aging have been pursuing a strategy of asking women to birth more, work more and care more — policies so contradictory that the approach is doomed to fail and leave women even worse off. Pushing women into the workforce, particularly mothers, without attendant structures to help them with care responsibilities just trades one problem for another. Women shouldn't have to choose between working, caregiving and reproductive autonomy, but that's exactly what will happen until policymakers start focusing on resilience instead of population targets. Jennifer D. Sciubba, Ph.D., is president and CEO of the Population Reference Bureau in Washington, D.C., and the author of '8 Billion and Counting: How Sex, Death, and Migration Shape Our World.' She discusses low fertility and its implications in her and on 'The Ezra Klein Show' in March 2024. Sciubba is the author of the forthcoming book, 'Toxic Demography: Ideology and the Politics of Population.'
