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William Zheng

Chinese grass roots government workers, who spent decades imposing strict birth control policies, are now calling up women in their neighbourhoods to urge them to get pregnant amid China’s demographic crisis.
When Jane Huang picked up the phone to answer a call earlier this month, her first response to the person on the end was to laugh.
“[Hello!] Is that Ms Huang? Sorry to disturb you. I am from your sub district office, are you pregnant now?”
Huang, a 35-year-old working mother of one son who lives in the southeast coastal province of Fujian, said the overly enthusiastic social worker even asked about the timing of her most recent period and offered to give her a reminder call when it was “the right time” to conceive another baby.


“I laughed so hard when I told my husband about it. The surveyor must be from the previous generation, who did not realise that she was talking to a whole different generation that values privacy, quality of life and choices much more,” she said.
Huang is among tens of thousands Chinese women of childbearing age who are being pursued through a vigorous campaign organised by vast district administrative networks. Grass-roots government workers have been mobilised to contact women in their neighbourhoods to urge them to get pregnant.
The central government also hopes to learn why so many women are reluctant to have more children, and devise new policy options as a plummeting birth rate steers the country towards a demographic crisis.
On October 17, China’s Population and Development Research Centre announced that it would conduct a nationwide survey in a bid to “obtain new data on views on marriage and fertility and key influencing factors”.
The Sample Survey on Population and Family Development in China, approved by the National Bureau of Statistics on October 11, is targeting women of child-bearing age – defined by the bureau as women aged between 15 and 49 – from about 30,000 families, covering 1,500 communities or villages across 150 counties.


The centre said the survey will focus on understanding “the actual difficulties and needs of families in birth and parenting”, as well as the reasons for “not wanting or not daring to have children”, to provide a scientific basis for improving fertility support policies and incentives.
In Huang’s case, the government effort was cut short. She said she ended the conversation quickly, telling the social worker that she had no immediate plans for a second child.
“When she asked why, I told her I have no money, no time and no energy for a second baby.”
Huang’s sentiment was “very common”, according to district level officials from three coastal provinces, who spoke to the Post on condition of anonymity. They said many respondents had vented “strong grievances” about the one-child policy as well as considerable worries about the economy and employment.
Many, who had been fined by the government for breaching the previous birth control rule, said the authorities should refund the penalties imposed on families, said one official from Fujian, surnamed Lin, who is involved in the survey.
“They said that is the best way for the government to show sincerity if it wants to promote births,” Lin added.
China scrapped its birth control policies in 2021, when Beijing raised the limit of children per family to three, and stopped imposing fines on families who exceed the quota.
Various local governments have pledged to “properly handle” historical issues resulting from the birth control policies, but there is no known case of the government refunding fines that were collected while the policies were in place, and no clear guidelines have been put in place on how to handle previous fines.
Previously, couples who had more children than allowed were required by the local birth control department to pay “social maintenance fees”, to have the child legally registered in the household.
In 2020, one couple in Guangzhou were fined nearly 320,000 yuan (US$44,870) for having a third child, according to mainland media reports.
A Guangdong district official surnamed Chen, said that besides the national survey, Guangdong and other coastal provinces had been trying to build their own provincial “population monitoring and research” database to keep track of population trends since 2022.
“It is a joint effort by the civil affairs, education, police, health, statistics, medical insurance, social security departments, to understand how many women in our district are of child-bearing age, their intentions to have more children, their physical condition and the family’s financial condition,” he said, adding that they have communicated with other provinces, including Zhejiang and Fujian, to learn the best practices.
Chen said some districts even offered women who intend to have more children in the near future free folic acid supplements, to help reduce the chance of birth defects.
A report published on October 19 by the YuWa Population Research Institute warned that the pro-birth policies aren’t enough to counter the declining birth rate, as more women choose not to marry or become mothers.
In 2022, China’s fertility rate dropped to 1.09 in 2022, according to the China Population and Development Research Centre, while the total fertility rate in Shanghai, one of China’s wealthiest cities, dipped to 0.6 in 2023, according to the municipality.
A replacement fertility rate of 2.1 children per woman is widely accepted as the necessary rate for a country’s population to remain constant.
If China’s fertility rate remains on its downward trajectory, for every child born in the future, six people will die – a trend that threatens to intensify the nation’s demographic crisis, the report warned.


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The national grass-roots campaign to gauge sentiment and create pregnancy incentives is running into lingering resentment and worry, officials say


The national grass-roots campaign to gauge sentiment and create pregnancy incentives is running into lingering resentment and worry, officials say.
