TL;DR:
A generation raised amid intense economic competition, expensive housing, and the one-child norm increasingly sees motherhood as a form of bondage and rejects it. The Chinese state, however, continues by inertia to rely on the same tools it used forty years ago, viewing women’s bodies merely as a means of reproducing the population. But it is no longer possible to return women to the model of “laborers by day, mothers of the nation by night.” Efforts to increase pressure only fuel resistance ... And the more radically the authorities try to control fertility, the more painful the side effects become.
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In the 1970s, China was going through hard times. The country had only begun to overcome the consequences of the Cultural Revolution, the economy was depleted, agriculture was inefficient, and memories of the mass famine that resulted from the Great Leap Forward had not yet faded. At the same time, birthrates remained extremely high: almost six children per woman. One measure aimed at combatting the crisis involved the implementation of demographic controls.
At the beginning of the decade, Beijing launched the nationwide campaign “Later, longer, fewer” (wan, xi, shao), which promoted later marriages, limits on the number of children per family (no more than two in cities and three in rural areas), and three–four-year gaps between births.
For the first time, the state deployed a whole set of tools: free contraceptives, mandatory consultations with specialists, and fines for failing to follow the state’s recommendations. But these measures did not produce the desired results. By the time Deng Xiaoping came to power in 1978, China’s population had reached 960 million people, while income levels and labor productivity remained extremely low.
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The new government declared its ambition to guide the country towards modernization and rapid economic growth, and it viewed the extremely high birthrate as a threat to national prosperity. In its effort to overcome the perceived problem, an unexpected figure became the architect of China’s new demographic policy: military engineer and missile-systems and cybernetics specialist Song Jian.
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The state of demographic science in China in the 1970s was poor, largely due to the fact that many specialists had been repressed or pushed out of the country. In this context, Song Jian’s cybernetic approach looked modern and persuasive to the authorities, writes Harvard anthropologist Susan Greenhalgh. With no alternative scenarios available, the idea of treating the population as a manageable system in which fertility is merely a parameter that administrators can adjust at will was accepted as a scientifically grounded solution.
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By the 2000s, demographers were beginning to realize that China’s official statistics did not reflect reality. In an article for Population and Development Review, researchers Philip Morgan, Gu Zhigang, and Sarah Hayford recalculated the figures, taking unregistered children into account. They estimated that the country’s total fertility rate had fallen below the replacement threshold, reaching 1.4–1.6 children per woman compared to the normal rate of 2.1, but it had not fallen to 1.0.
In 2013, Chinese authorities allowed couples to have two children if at least one spouse was an only child. Then, starting from Jan. 1, 2016, further amendments to the population and family-planning law took effect granting any family the right to have a second child. In May 2021, Beijing permitted Chinese families to have three children, issuing the document “On optimizing birth policies and promoting long-term and balanced population growth.”
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In a study published in November in the European Journal of Population, researcher Shen Shaomin points out that the “generation of only children” tends to want even fewer children than their parents. The share of Chinese who prefer not to have children at all has nearly tripled when compared with the 1980s generation. Once it becomes normal in society to have a single child, reversing that norm is nearly impossible.
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Beijing attempts a change
The contraceptive tax introduced in December 2025 is the most notable, but not the only attempt by Chinese authorities to influence the country’s demographics. Over the past five years, dozens of provinces and cities across China have adopted their own programs to boost birthrates, experimenting with direct cash payments, tax breaks, housing subsidies, and extended parental leave.
The ideological component is also growing stronger. In 2021, China’s State Council issued a “Development Plan for Chinese Women,” which included language about “strengthening national resources” and “building a harmonious family.” In line with this, state media and party platforms began actively promoting the image of a “responsible mother,” who is expected to “contribute to the nation’s destiny” by having two or three children.
At the same time, human rights organizations are noticing attempts to restrict access to abortion, especially those sought for nonmedical reasons. In its “World Report 2025: China,” Human Rights Watch notes increasing gender discrimination and growing limits on reproductive rights. Amnesty International reports cases in which medical institutions were advised to dissuade women from terminating pregnancies, and the set of documentation required for performing such procedures has expanded.
Women without a voice
In its attempts to stimulate population growth, the government completely ignores women’s perspectives, which only worsens the situation. In the article “China’s Low Fertility Rate from the Perspective of Gender and Development” (2021), researchers Ji Yuxiang and Zheng Zhou note that domestic labor still falls almost entirely on women, even as they are expected to build careers. Motherhood results in slower career advancement for women, a 30–40% drop in income, and additional burdens at home. These losses cannot be offset by a 10,000-yuan payment.
In October 2020, Chinese social media began circulating a translation of the article “We Are Not Flowers, We Are a Fire”, which sets out the principles of the South Korean radical feminist movement known as “6B4T.” This ideology calls for rejecting heterosexual relationships, marriage, childbearing, emotional labor for men, and adherence to beauty standards. The name is a direct reference to the Confucian code of gender relations “Three Obediences and Four Virtues,” which places women in a subordinate position, requiring them to obey their father before marriage, their husband during marriage, their son in widowhood, and to preserve “moral purity,” modesty, and domestic skills.
The cost of birth control
China is aging rapidly. According to the country’s National Bureau of Statistics, at the start of 2025 the population stood at 1.4 billion people. As shown in research by demographers Xuejian Peng and Dietrich Fausten, by 2035 a quarter of China’s population — roughly 350 million people — will be over 60. This means the “demographic window” in which several working-age people supported each retiree is effectively closing.
The aging of the population is placing a heavy burden on the pension system, prompting the authorities to adopt painful reforms. On Jan. 1, 2025, China began a gradual increase in the retirement age. Over an implementation period of 15 years, the age for men will rise from 60 to 63, and for women from 50–55 to 55–58, depending on their type of employment. At the same time, more flexible retirement rules are being introduced, and the period of pension contributions is being extended.
The country is feeling an increasingly acute shortage of young workers, especially in the low-wage segments of the labor market. Whereas in the 2010s China had more than a billion people aged 15–64, by 2024–2025 the number had fallen to about 880–890 million. The corporate sector is responding to the problem by expanding automation, while the authorities are discussing bringing in workers from neighboring countries.
The one-family-one-child policy also led to a significant gender imbalance. This was largely tied to the traditional patriarchal model of rural Chinese families: the son remains in the household, inherits the land, and bears responsibility for supporting his parents in old age (the pension system in rural areas was virtually nonexistent).
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