China’s top health body issued joint policy guidelines on its official website on Aug. 16 to encourage more births as part of the ruling communist party’s efforts to “promote long-term balanced development of the population.”
The document, titled “Guidelines on Further Improving and Implementing Supportive Measures of Active Reproduction,” was jointly published by 17 different departments, including the regime’s National Health Commission, the Propaganda Department, the State Tax Administration, the Ministry of Education, and the General Logistics Department of the Central Military Commission, among others.
It set out 20 detailed measures to boost China’s flagging birth rates and reduce abortions. These measures include increasing child-care facilities and help, offering favorable housing policies to families with multiple children, and creating a “reproduction-friendly employment environment.”
The Chinese Communist Party’s joint effort to promote childrearing are “unprecedented,” according to Chang Feng-Yi (executive director, Taiwan Labor and Social Policy Research Association), in an interview with The Epoch Times in Chinese.
Low Fertility and Aging Population
China’s official data shows a record low population in 2021, with 10. 62 million births in 2021, compared with 12 million in 2020 and 14. 65 million in 2019, as reported by CCP mouthpiece Xinhua news agency in January 2022.
China’s fertility rate is 1. 16 in 2021, far below the 2.1 OECD standard for a stable population and among the lowest in the world.
Chang thinks that CCP official data was altered in order to hide the true extent of the crisis. Chang stated that it will be difficult for the regime to get young couples pregnant.
” Our social security system depends on the support of young people, be it taxation or social insurance. China’s aging population is a serious problem .”
, since it is such an important country.
In addition to record-low birth rates, China’s retirement population is growing rapidly. According to Banyuetan, a state-run political propaganda mouthpiece, the “biggest gray tide ever” is to be expected in the coming decade–people born in the 1960s will retire from 2022, with an average number of 20 million from this age group retiring every year.
The CCP’s most recent data show that 267. 36 million Chinese are over 60 years old, accounting for nearly 19 percent of the country’s population.
Guo Shuqing, chairman of China’s Banking and Insurance Regulatory Commission, told Xinhua in 2020 that China expects “a pension gap of eight to ten trillion yuan ($1. 17 to $1. 46 trillion)” in the coming five to ten years.
Unwilling To Have Children
In 2021, the Chinese regime further relaxed its family planning policies to encourage people to have three children, responding to demographic changes following many years of its one child policy. However, even the CCP’s Health Commission admitted in May 2021 that “a large portion of families have still decided not to give birth despite wanting another baby.”
James R. Gorrie, the author of “The China Crisis” and contributor to The Epoch Times, wrote in a June commentary for the publication that “two-thirds of mostly women between the ages of 18 and 31 have chosen not to have children.”
“China’s youth… refuse to legitimize [the CCP] through having children,” Gorrie stated in his article.
A man from Shanghai refused to travel to a central isolation location in May. He was told by police that his actions could have serious consequences for his family.
Financial pressure is another reason young Chinese couples resist having more children.
According to Radio Free Asia, Chinese netizens responded to China’s August document by saying, “Encouraging fertility is first and foremost an economic issue, not a policy issue, and it cannot be resolved by issuing a document.”
Earlier in June 2021, The Epoch Times reported that the mother of a 12-year-old in Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province, disclosed that the average annual expenditure she faces to support her child was $12,000, which exceeds the city’s 2020 average personal disposable income (PDI) of $10,700.
Hangzhou is one of the wealthiest cities in China–in 2020, Hangzhou’s urban PDI was the fourth highest after Beijing, Shanghai, and Suzhou, while China’s average PDI was $5,000.
No Dignity and Freedom for Chinese People
Chu Han is a China affairs analyst who believes the CCP’s current policies for encouraging childbirth won’t work.
When speaking with the Chinese language edition of The Epoch Times on Aug. 17, Chu said that no matter what the policy, the communist regime doesn’t give the Chinese people any dignity or freedom, and tramples all over the bottom line of human civilization.
“In 1978, former CCP leader Deng Xiaoping randomly decided on the one-child policy, and he changed the fate of the people of the whole country,” Chu said.
Coerced and forced abortions were implemented from 1978 to 2016, with the regime claiming that its policy prevented 400 million births from 1979 to 2011, The Epoch Times reported in 2014.
Seeing that the one-child policy is creating a crisis in the population, Chu stated that the CCP would like to make Chinese citizens have more children.
” The CCP wants control over the heavens and the earth and also the wombs and wombs for Chinese women,” he stated, adding that the Chinese people are deprived of dignity and freedom. How could they allow more children to be born under this pressure ?
Ning Haizhong and Luo Ya contributed to the article.
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Sophia Lam joined The Epoch Times in 2021 and she covers China-related topics.
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