China's Women Continue to Buck Party Line

They're resisting calls for more kids, contributing to 2nd straight year of population decline
By Arden Dier,  Newser Staff
Posted Jan 17, 2024 3:07 PM CST
China's Women Continue to Buck Party Line
Women take a selfie with apples baring Chinese characters for "Peaceful" outside the Wangfujing Church, a Catholic church, on Christmas Eve in Beijing, Sunday, Dec. 24, 2023.   (AP Photo/Andy Wong)

China's promises of cash, tax deductions, and housing subsidies for women who have children failed to pay off again in 2023. Though President Xi Jinping has talked a lot about the need for women to focus on marriage and children, the country's birth rate fell for a seventh straight year, "accelerating the government's sense of crisis over the country's rapidly aging population and its economic future," the New York Times reports.

China has more older people than any other country, with roughly 300 million citizens, or about 20% of the population, aged 60 and older. That number is expected to grow to 400 million by 2035, the same year China's pension system is expected to be depleted, per Reuters. But the population isn't just getting older. It's also getting smaller. It declined by roughly 2 million people in 2023—with 9.02 million births and 11.1 million deaths—to roughly 1.4 billion, according to the National Bureau of Statistics.

The drop is "well above the population decline of 850,000 in 2022, which had been the first since 1961 during the Great Famine of the Mao Zedong era," per Reuters. Deaths rose 6.6% from 2022 to the highest level since 1974, due in part to the spread of COVID-19 following the lifting of strict quarantine measures. But births also declined 5.7% to a record low of 6.39 per 1,000 people. As the Times reports, China's one-child policy, in place from 1980 to 2015, "created generations of young only-child girls who were given an education and employment opportunities" and now resist efforts to return them to more traditional roles. (More China stories.)

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