Three Is Best, Says China

[MsAmerica]

What's startling is a graph showing that China's birthrate had already been dropping drastically, and there may have been no need to interfere. Now it's coming back to bite them.



Three Is Best: How China’s Family Planning Propaganda Has Changed
By Isabelle Qian and Pablo Robles

For decades, China harshly restricted the number of children couples could have, arguing that everyone would be better off with fewer mouths to feed. The government’s one-child policy was woven into the fabric of everyday life, through slogans on street banners and in popular culture and public art.
Now, faced with a shrinking and aging population, China is using many of the same propaganda channels to send the opposite message: Have more babies.
The government has also been offering financial incentives for couples to have two or three children. But the efforts have not been successful. The birthrate in China has fallen steeply, and last year was the lowest since the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949.

Instead of enforcing birth limits, the government has shifted gears to promote a “pro-birth culture,” organizing beauty pageants for pregnant women and producing rap videos about the advantages of having children...

The propaganda effort has been met with widespread ridicule. Critics have regarded the campaign as only the latest sign that policymakers are blind to the increasing costs and other challenges people face in raising multiple children.
They have also mocked the recent messaging for the obvious regulatory whiplash after decades of limiting births with forced abortions and hefty fines. Between 1980 and 2015, the year the one-child policy officially ended, the Chinese government used extensive propaganda to warn that having more babies would hinder China’s modernization.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/03/09/world/asia/china-childbirth-propaganda.html

[bigyellowTpot]

why do people post links to articles that you need to buy a subscription to view.

[MsAmerica]

In case you didn't notice, I included the gist of it, plus enough information so that you can do a search on your own,

Also, although it's not my fault if a news source feels it needs to make a profit, many good libraries carry it, and some will even let you access it for free from home online.

[anotherside]

I think it was right that China try to shrinken its population, though undoubtedly they went about it the wrong way at times. Nowadays in China the cost of living and supporting children (which in China usually also includes contributing significantly toward a property for them) makes a 2nd/3rd child simply unworkable for many.

But of course shrinking populations are a problem across basically every single advanced economy too. People living in wealthyish countries with rocketing living costs increasingly don’t want kids. The only solution Europe has seems to be mass immigration - which simply kicks the problem another generation down the road until the real route of the problem - costs of living - has been resolved.

[MsAmerica]

You're right that it was reasonable for China to want to stem a population explosion, but it's a bit amusing when a country imagines that the people can be endlessly manipulated - and it backfires.