Why China’s motherhood question looms over the country’s long-term future

Young women are turning their backs on marriage and children while elderly numbers boom and negative population growth is forecast by 2025

Demographer says the issue has potential to be elevated to a national security level

5-MIN READ5-MIN

Chinese women are turning their backs on motherhood in growing numbers, while officials warn the country’s population will start to shrink by 2025. Photo: AFP

Published: 6:00am, 4 Oct 2022

By refusing to countenance motherhood, Beijing-based secretary Zhang Hanjing – along with hundreds of thousands of women also of childbearing age – is giving Chinese authorities a headache.

Zhang, who says she is also unwilling to marry, is in perfect health and financially capable of raising a child, but watching her friends go through the experience in recent years – some with their second or third children – has only deterred her.

The exhaustion and the peer pressure faced by young mothers frightened her, Zhang said. “You hire a babysitter because all the others are doing it, you sign your kid up to extracurricular activities for the same reason.”

For Zhang, and many like her, the stress and pain of giving birth far outweigh the benefits in China, where many mothers face the toil of childcare alone and often have to worry about giving up or losing their jobs as well.

This is despite the repeated easing of birth restrictions – from the end of the one-child policy in 2015 to today’s encouragement of women to have three children – to stem China’s population decline.

Local authorities have also offered incentives to new mothers, but they face an uphill battle to deliver the demographic shift required to implement President Xi Jinping’s ambitious plans for economic growth and innovation – central to his promise for the “great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation”.

Xi has repeatedly referred to China’s ageing population as a “comprehensive, long-term and strategic” issue.