China shows little appetite for lifting of family size limit

Liu Wen, a public servant in China’s north-western Qinghai province, remembers the night before she went back to work after taking three months off to care for her newborn son. She was anxious. “I kept telling myself don’t worry, relax, have a good night’s sleep and a fresh start tomorrow.” Her husband, a doctor, was on a night shift, so she was alone. At about 1am, her son started to cry. While holding him, she also burst into tears.

“He was crying and I was crying,” she said. At that point, Liu decided she would never have another child. “Thank you, family planning. One is definitely enough,” she said.

For decades, from the late 1970s, China’s one-child policy barred many couples from having multiple children. Over the past five years, the country has been phasing out that policy, making new exemptions and eventually allowing all parents to have two children.

Now authorities may be considering lifting limits altogether. But experts say the change is unlikely to much affect the country’s demographic direction. Prohibited by the high costs of education, housing and childcare, few Chinese couples actually want more than two children. Even under the two-child rule, few have chosen to have more than one.

“Even if our government lifts the limits on how many children a family can have, I don’t think there will be a big increase of newborns,” said Wen Xi, 28, head of marketing at a radio station in Beijing. “Feeding ourselves is hard enough, let alone feeding a new life.”

She has decided to spend her energy and money on herself and her mother, who raised Wen on her own.

It was reported this week that China’s state council, its cabinet, had commissioned a study on the impact of scrapping restrictions on family size, a move that could happen as soon as this year.

It would mark an end to one of the largest social engineering experiments the world has seen, one that many regard as a mistake. Today, China faces an ageing population with little social support, a shrinking workforce and one of the world’s lowest fertility rates.

“It is just another historical policy blunder that the government, perhaps society as well, would like to erase from memory quickly. But this one will not be easy,” said Wang Feng, a professor of sociology at the University of California, Irvine.

Liu, for example, has been resisting her mother-in-law’s calls for another grandchild. “From the day my son was born, we were competing with other parents on what kind of milk powder he was drinking, what kind of instrument he would learn, which kindergarten was better, which primary school would be better, which tutor is better. All this competition is driving us and our son crazy,” she said.

More young, professional women want just one child or none at all. “Definitely not,” said Wei Teng, a cultural studies scholar based in Guangzhou, on whether she would consider a second child.

Even if couples were willing to have more children, the cohort of Chinese parents today is small. According to Yong Cai, an associate professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, China experienced a “baby bust” in the 1990s, a decade after the one-child policy was implemented. At the end of the 1980s, the number of births a year was about 28m; by the mid-1990s it had dropped to 18m.

“We have fewer people having children, so the number of new births will continue to decline no matter what,” Yong said. Now we were seeing “the echo of that baby bust”, he said.

Last year the number of births fell 4% from the year before and China’s fertility rate was at 1.24 births per woman, below the expected rate of 1.63, according to Yi Fuxian, a demographer at the University of Wisconsin’s School of Medicine and Public Health.

China’s family planning limits have been maintained through forced abortions and sterilisations, and steep fines. Some joke that Chinese authorities will deploy its interventionist methods to encourage the birth rate. An image of one of China’s iconic red propaganda banners, doctored to say “If you don’t have children when you should, we will push you to become pregnant”, received more than 6,000 likes after it was posted online this year.

Lifting the limit is not all good news for Chinese women, who many say benefited from the “only-child dividend” and received resources that would normally have been reserved for a boy. By the late 1990s women accounted for almost 40% of student enrolment at universities and by 2008 they had overtaken their male counterparts.

It is already common for managers in the private sector and academia to refuse female applicants. Many companies prefer to employ women who have already had one child, safe in the knowledge that their child-rearing days are over.

“If the Chinese government does not enforce protections on female employees, companies will have more reasons to turn down female candidates,” said Emily Zheng, an academic based in Beijing who studies popular culture.

Still, loosening family planning restrictions has already had a positive impact at the micro-level, on individual families. Ning, 34, who works at a bank in Hangzhou, remembers when his mother became pregnant in 1989 with what was then known as an illegal second child. Afraid that neighbours would report her to family planning controllers who would force her to have an abortion, Ning’s mother hid in a nearby village. When Ning’s little sister was born, his parents, both farmers, paid their life savings in fines, the equivalent of about $100.

In 2015, Ning found himself in the same situation. His wife was expecting another child after already having a girl. They considered an abortion but heard there might be a loophole. For months the couple shuttled between government departments. A few months before his wife’s due date, they were little more than halfway through applying for the exemption when China announced all parents could now have a second child.

“All our problems were gone. All we needed now was proof that my wife was pregnant, that’s all, and then we waited for our second child. We felt really lucky.”

Ning said he and his wife were unlikely to have a third child. “Having two kids is enough for us,” he said.

Additional reporting by Wang Xueying