China’s population woes have state organs, demographers calling for drastic societal changes to boost birth rate
- Giving parents job-like salaries for raising children, shortening pre-college education, and offering greater support for working mothers are all receiving consideration
- Calling to lower the costs of raising and educating children, the head of China Family Planning Association says population is ‘a matter of national importance’
On the International Day of Families, Chinese authorities took the timely opportunity to stress the importance of boosting population quality while making fresh pledges of support for childbirth, as deepening demographic challenges continue to have an outsized impact on the world’s second-largest economy.
Amid a rising reluctance to raise children, primarily due to high costs, China needs to foster a child-bearing-friendly society to maintain an appropriate birth rate, according to a commentary in the state-run newspaper Economic Daily on Monday, an annual day to recognise the importance of family, initiated by the United Nations.
To create such an environment, “we should focus on removing various factors that keep people from having children, so that they are willing and can afford to be parents, which will help us achieve a moderate fertility level and optimise the demographic structure”, the commentary said.
Those factors include insufficient childcare services; high property prices and education costs; and women’s concerns about the impacts on their careers, it noted.
But besides incentivising people to have babies, China needs to focus more on education and skills training to tackle the nation’s shrinking working-age population, party mouthpiece People’s Daily said in an article on the same day.
