Chinese couples still reluctant to have 3 children despite policy shift, surveys show
- Parents listed the heavy economic burden of child rearing, insufficient time and energy and work pressure as the main obstacles to having a third child
- While many local authorities have rolled out initiatives to encourage more births, the surveys show that current incentives are far from enough
Few Chinese parents appear to want three children nearly one-and-a-half years after the government introduced a three-child policy to boost the dwindling fertility rate, surveys show.
In Guangzhou, a prosperous city in southern China, for example, only about 9 per cent of residents want three children or more, according to a survey conducted by the Guangdong Academy of Population Development in November and December last year.
The survey result, which was released in August, showed that more than 80 per cent of the 23,323 respondents wished to have one or more kids, with most wanting two.
Parents listed the heavy economic burden of child rearing, insufficient time and energy and work pressure as the main obstacles to having more children, according to the study.
While fertility intentions can forecast childbearing behaviour, they can also overestimate the fertility rate, according to experts.
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“The willingness to have two children is very common in China, same as many other countries such as Japan and South Korea, but this is an ideal circumstance, most of the people cannot realistically afford or achieve,” said Jiang Quanbao, a demography professor at Xian Jiaotong University.
“Especially now, it’s very likely that the number of births in China will further decrease this year.”
There are chances that China will see a negative population growth in 2022, Jiang said.
The last time China saw deaths exceed births was in 1960 – during the Great Chinese Famine – data from the National Bureau of Statistics showed.
A similar survey conducted in the capital Beijing last year revealed that of 2,060 people aged between 18 and 50, only 4.2 per cent said there was a “high probability” of them having three children, while more than 80 per cent said there was a “small probability”.
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The survey, which was also released in August, suggested that fertility intentions could be boosted by nearly 31 percentage points with more supportive government policies and services.
“This means meeting the reproductive needs of the population is an important measure to increase the willingness to have children,” the report said.
In northwestern Shaanxi province, a survey conducted last year showed that nearly 70 per cent of the 417 respondents were reluctant or unwilling to have three children, while only 7.3 per cent were eager.
According to the report published in February, women are more unwilling to have three children than men, young people are more reluctant to have three children than those in middle age and the higher the level of education, the less willingness to have three children.
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China’s low fertility rate cannot be reversed by loosening fertility restrictions alone, the report added.
To deal with the challenges of an ageing population, Beijing announced that couples can have up to three children in May last year.
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“From the cost-benefit comparison of the three-child birth policy, it is found that under the current circumstances, the supporting measures provided by the policy are difficult to balance with the cost of raising, and it is difficult to reduce the excessively high cost of raising through policy support,” the Shaanxi report said.
“For this reason, the general reaction of public opinion was relatively negative on the introduction of the three-child policy.”
The Guangzhou survey also found that 77.8 per cent of the participants think solving the problem of childcare for infants would have a great impact on their willingness to bear children.
But men are more certain and confident than women on the issue, as women are more inclined to think that the impact of such policy support should not be overestimated.
