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He Huifeng

Few places in China have held on to the ideal of big families as stubbornly as the people of the Teochew homeland, also known in Chinese as Chaoshan.
The coastal region of eastern Guangdong – encompassing the cities of Chaozhou, Shantou and Jieyang and serving as the setting for the hit indie film Dear You – has long been known for its strong family ties and close-knit clans, with ancestral halls central to village life, and strong networks of siblings that serve as a safety net for family businesses, entrepreneurial endeavours and a far-flung overseas diaspora.
That tradition has helped make Guangdong province China’s biggest source of newborns. The area recorded 1 million births last year, roughly one in eight of all births nationwide, with a birth rate of 7.82 per 1,000 people, well above the national rate of 5.63 per 1,000 people, according to official statistics.
Yet even in this family-first heartland, the birth rate is falling fast. In Shantou, the local birth rate fell from 13.2 per 1,000 in 2021 to 7.89 in 2025, matching the provincial average. In nearby Jieyang, the rate declined from 16.2 in 2019 to 9.35 in 2025, a drop of about 40 per cent in six years.
For Chaoshan’s younger generation, the region’s traditional preference for big families is increasingly running up against the realities of modern life. Both residents and demographers say that without stronger economic support and new measures to encourage births, those traditions may not be enough to keep the region’s fertility rate above the national trend for much longer.
“If I could afford it, I would have three children,” said Sherry Chen, 32, a Chaozhou native. She says there are advantages to having more siblings, including better support for ageing parents and lifelong companionship. But among her peers back home, having only two children is increasingly common due to finances, she said.
“Better-off Chaoshan residents in their 30s are still keen to have three or even four children. The old logic still works, if you have the money.”
Under China’s one-child policy, which began in 1979 and ended in 2016, larger families were rare due to strict fines for additional births, though exceptions existed for parents without siblings who wished to have a second child, as well as for “daughter-only” couples in certain rural areas. The prevalence of multiple children in Chaoshan stemmed from a mix of exploiting policy loopholes and a willingness to pay penalties.


Li Xian, a married mother of two from Shantou in her late 30s, sees this generational divide within her own family. Her father was one of eight siblings, but two children have become the norm for her generation.
She said one of her younger brothers stayed in their hometown, where he married and had two children and has plans for a third, backed by housing provided by his parents and lower living costs in the area. Another brother moved to Guangzhou for work and chose to remain single due to the cost of living for urban families.
“He thinks living on his own means far less money stress,” Li said.
That trade-off is increasingly visible across China. China’s marriage registrations fell 7.5 per cent year on year to nearly 3.28 million in the first half of 2026, a drop of 264,000 from the previous year, according to data released by the Ministry of Civil Affairs earlier this month.
Ren Zeping, a high-profile Chinese economist, recently highlighted that the unmarried rate for men aged 30 to 34 had reached nearly 28 per cent, driven by the rising cost of living and housing prices.
Ren warned on his social media account on August 23 that China’s marriage market faced pressure from people marrying later, an increase in divorce and a growing pool of unmarried people, particularly men in their early 30s.
For Li and Chen, the weakening of clan networks was continuing to reshape family planning decisions. Villages and clans once offered not just a social identity but practical financial backing, with youth returning to their hometowns for traditional customs that helped to reinforce clan-based business networks and systems built on shared capital, credit-sharing and mutual investment.
“The village used to be a shared economic unit,” Li said. “Now people earn their livelihoods independently outside the village and even Chaoshan. Clan rituals are transitioning from a necessity to an optional tradition.”
“For centuries, people here valued big families as a way to maintain our clan roots, overseas ties, family businesses, and local networks,” Li added.
Yet, as she observed, even the thousand-year-old, deeply entrenched traditions are no match for the harsh financial realities facing the younger generation.
“Now, city living and financial pressure are simply eroding those traditional values. Without strong policy support, urbanisation and financial stress will inevitably drag our birth rate down to match the rest of the country.”


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Economic pressure is outweighing traditional value of having large families in the Chaoshan area of eastern Guangdong


Economic pressure is outweighing traditional value of having large families in the Chaoshan area of eastern Guangdong.


Even in the fertility heartland, China can’t stop its birth rate from falling

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}Economic pressure is outweighing traditional value of having large families in the Chaoshan area of eastern Guangdong

Economic pressure is outweighing traditional value of having large families in the Chaoshan area of eastern Guangdong