Opinion | Why many Chinese women are giving motherhood a miss – it’s not just the high cost of raising a child
- Women from the one-child generation tend to be assertive and career-focused. Their aspirations do not always include motherhood and they are less influenced by calls from the government
- Beijing should introduce and enforce policies to support working women – including single women – who want to have children
After the Chinese Communist Party took power in 1949, Chairman Mao Zedong foolishly encouraged women to produce more children, believing that a large population would be good for nation-building, without considering the strain this would put on resources.
Women with more than five children were referred to as “glorious mothers”. When the authorities realised their mistake, an ineffective voluntary family planning policy was put in place in the late 1950s.
To ensure that most couples adhered to the policy – with the exception of ethnic minorities and rural couples whose firstborn was a girl – coercive and sometimes brutal measures, such as forced abortion, were deployed. The birth rate dropped dramatically, from 5.9 in 1970 to 1.6 in the late 1990s.