Posted on 04/02/2025 5:28:12 PM PDT by nickcarraway
The trend among Chinese women of postponing or eschewing marriage will undermine Beijing’s efforts to boost falling birth rates, says Yi Fuxian of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
New marriages in China reportedly plummeted by one-fifth last year, implying that the official number of births will likely fall from 9.54 million in 2024 to between 7.3 million and 7.8 million in 2025. Thus, while China represents 17.2 per cent of the global population, it will account for less than 6 per cent of births – comparable to Nigeria. Moreover, China’s fertility rate in 2025 is expected to fall to 0.9 births per woman (2.1 is the standard replacement level), just half of what officials predicted in 2016. So alarming is this demographic reality that early this month, Chinese Premier Li Qiang announced that the government will be rolling out new policies to boost the birth rate.
But the marriage crisis will greatly undermine these efforts. Marriages already plummeted from 13.47 million couples in 2013 to 6.11 million in 2024 – albeit with some deviation in the period of 2020 to 2024, owing to the zero-COVID policy. Likewise, the overall marriage rate fell from 9.9 per 1,000 people to 4.3 over the same period, compared to 5.4 in Taiwan and 6.1 in the United States (2023). Why is this happening? Unfortunately for the Chinese leadership, there is no single cause.
AN ACCELERATING TREND
Salient factors include the steady decline in China’s childbearing-age population; changes in lifestyle; the lingering effects of the (now-discarded) one-child policy on attitudes toward marriage and childbearing; the persistent oversupply of men; and high youth unemployment.
(Excerpt) Read more at channelnewsasia.com ...
The more societies ‘advance’, the number of children per household declines, it seems like.
It's not an "oversupply" of men as if God made a disproportionate number of Chinese male babies. It's that the Chinese killed off so many of their female babies.
If the birth rate just stabilized China’s population would drop to about 500 million by 2100. But of course past performance is no guarantee of future results. Rates could in fact decline even more. It is going to be tough being old in China with nobody to change your diaper.
Those girls should hang tight and not settle. There’s a multi-millionaire out there for each and every one.
You notice they say “the official number of births”. The number are widely thought to be faked by local officials. When they reach school age, it seems like many babies have mysteriously disappeared.
Sorry, the world is depending on countries like Nigeria. (Nigeria is 10th highest in birth rate. But it’s significantly behind countries like Niger.)
Another reason is that many young people just don’t want to get married and have kids. They also don’t want to have a long -term job. They see no reason for anyone that.
They want to just “lay flat” and make enough for them to survive and enjoy their lives.
Five years ago, I read the average age in China would be older than the U.S. by 2030. Maybe it already is.
“Enjoy”
reading article only because of the author’s name...
They did it to themselves, forcing women to have abortions so that they had only one child, for decades.
All Communist countries have population declines.
Who would have thought slaves would drop their shovels and walk away?
As a totalitarian country, they could do some things to strongly encourage marriage and family, which could not be done in other countries.
It would decline more, I believe. China’s debt is not manageable by it’s current population. As its population drops, their share of the debt grows. Many people will simply be living to service the debt, forget about having children.
CORRECT! Because in Chinese culture the oldest SON takes care of the parents when they retire. So, if you’re only allowed 1 child, you wanted it to be a boy.
They’re now reaping the reward of that shortsightedness.
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