ROB SCHMITZ, HOST:
This month marks 10 years since China ended its one-child policy in order to address an aging population and a shrinking workforce. The government eventually removed all limits on how many children couples can have. But cultural and economic changes mean families in China now prefer fewer children, leaving the government to figure out ways to encourage larger families, including a new contraceptive tax that began this month. So where does the country go from here? Cindy Yu is a British Chinese journalist, an editor and columnist at The Times of London, and writes the Chinese Whispers Substack. Cindy, welcome.
CINDY YU: Hi there.
SCHMITZ: Cindy, we've seen quite an about-face from the Chinese government in the past decade. Now, the government is imposing a 13% sales tax on contraceptives to try and boost the population - one of a package of financial incentives to encourage Chinese couples to have more babies. Is this working?
YU: No, it's not working, really. China's population is still declining. And at the beginning of each year, we get the figures for the year previously, and I think we expect this year that the new data coming out will say that in 2025 China's population will be declining for the fourth year in a row.
SCHMITZ: Why are Chinese couples now thinking twice about big families?
YU: Well, this is the big question that is bothering demographers everywhere. And to be fair, this is not a problem that only China is facing. There are only theories because actually no population, when decline starts, actually managed to turn that trend, like Japan and like in Taiwan. But some of the theories that go in the Chinese case are, for example, the education of women. We can expect the current female generation to be the most educated cohort of women probably ever in China's millennia of history. And so they have other things to do with their lives, right? Stuff like careers and studying.
But fundamentally, there is basically a calculus being had here. You know, is it worth it to have children, and how much of a sacrifice does that give you as a person in their society if you go ahead and have that child compared to what you could have otherwise?
SCHMITZ: Right. And a lot of this, of course, boils down to economics. I mean, it is too expensive now to have children, in urban China especially. But the government perspective is, you know, we need workers to keep our economic engine running. What happens if the government cannot persuade couples to have more children?
YU: Right. So just briefly on the cost of raising children in China, a really interesting study shows that it's about 80- to $85,000 per average child raised in China, which is about six times as high as its GDP per capita.
SCHMITZ: Wow.
YU: And if you look at other Western countries, like Australia, for example, is only twice as much as their GDP per capita. So somewhere along the line, urban China have basically inflated their expectations of child raising so much that it's become probably one of the most expensive countries in the world to raise children. And so it looks like, according to the U.N., its medium projection for the end of the century for the country is that China's population will only be about 700 million people, and that's half the size as it is now. That will have all sorts of knock-on effects.
You will have fewer people of working age. You will have more people of retirement age, which means a higher strain on your pension system, on your health care system, whilst at the same time, you're taking a hit on your economic innovation because there are studies that show, you know, younger people, people under 30, unfortunately, are more creative and more innovative in the economy. So all of that will have an impact, if you will.
SCHMITZ: You know, you say this, and I'm thinking of Chinese in their 20s and 30s and how much pressure they must be under. I know that there's the tang ping movement, the idea of laying flat, laying down, and really doing nothing as the best way to handle the stress of holding the country's economic future in your hands. You know, what's it like for young Chinese these days?
YU: As we speak, Rob, this week, the top most popular app on Apple's paid apps categories is an app called Si Le Me. Basically means, are you dead? It's for young people who live alone to tap in, check in every other day or every day, and if they don't check in, it sends a notification to their emergency contact to say, go check on them now. I think it's the long social tail of the rapid economic growth that China has gone over that has had - you know, this is the psychological impact on the society. It's the stretch marks, if you will.
SCHMITZ: That is Cindy Yu. She's an editor and columnist for The Times of London and author of the Chinese Whispers Substack. Cindy, thank you so much.
YU: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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