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.
“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.