Members of the influential Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) National Committee said on Monday that China will remove all restrictions on the number of children a family can have and provide equal recognition and equal recognition to children of single parents. He suggested expanding benefits to shore up crumbling demographics. .
Xiong Shuilong, an advisor to the CPPCC, said it is no longer appropriate to limit family size as China’s birth rate has declined sharply enough to call into question future social and industrial plans.National government Global Times Quote Some of his suggestions:
Zion proposed completely removing limits on the number of children residents can have, truly restoring the right to have children to families. At the same time, unmarried or single parents will be given equal rights to enjoy relevant maternity support policies, Zion said in a draft proposal to be submitted during two sessions this year.
The political advisor also proposed reducing the social costs directly borne by companies when their female employees give birth. The proposals include improving the cost-sharing system for maternity leave and significantly reducing the social security costs that companies pay for female employees during maternity leave and extended prenatal check-ups. Zion suggested that companies that employ women of childbearing age could be granted certain income tax breaks.
In order to reduce the burden on parents, they appealed to local governments to provide subsidies to households with multiple children and accelerate the construction of public kindergartens and nursing homes.
of Global Times Anticipated demographic and family policy will be a hot topic at the CPPCC’s upcoming national conference, the first of which is scheduled to be held “next week.” Individual states also have advisory boards, and some states have advisory boards. Discussed Recently, the population has been decreasing.
While Chinese authorities and state media tend to treat population decline as a troublingly stubborn problem that the Communist Party will soon address with the perfect combination of policies, foreign analysts say China has We believe that even developed countries are approaching the event horizon of population decline from which they cannot escape.
January, Peterson Institute for International Economics (PIIE) warned China’s population decline is “approaching irreversibility,” he said.China has already overtaken Japan, which is in the early stages of Asia’s population decline, and is approaching an alarming population decline. Fertility treatment crash Korean.
PIIE speculates that 2024 may be China’s best chance to emerge from its demographic collapse, due to the “possibility of marriages postponed due to lifted COVID-19 restrictions” This is because the year of the Dragon is “often considered a lucky year for having children.” However, both of these factors are likely to be marginal and temporary.
The Institute observed the following:
There is nothing to suggest that China’s TFR was. [Total Fertility Rate] In the long run, it will reverse and rise again. South Korea leads the way with a low TFR of 0.72, but Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, Beijing, Shanghai, and other major Chinese cities currently all have a TFR of 1 or well below. Even from these regions, Japan has one of the highest birth rates among the developed countries in Asia.
PIIE believes that the prospects for China’s population recovery are so bleak that the Chinese government will soon abandon its dream of surpassing the United States and becoming the world’s largest economic power, and the leaders of the Chinese Communist Party probably announced this long ago. would have known this from, but suggested they would have known. They are falsifying the books to hide the true extent of the decline.
The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) also was suggested In January, China manipulated its demographic statistics to maintain its vision of unstoppable economic growth, relying on “the shaky statistical assumption that birthrates will ‘recover’ in coming decades.” announced.
“Such trends have not been observed anywhere in East Asia at all in the past few decades. In fact, fertility rates are moving in quite the opposite direction,” CFR said of China’s optimistic projections for 2025 and beyond. Ta.
A frequently cited factor in Asia’s population decline is a shared strong cultural prejudice against single parenthood, which is often reflected in childcare policies that are more permissive for married couples. Because of this, young, career-oriented Asian women tend to be even more nervous about raising children alone than their Western counterparts, and so, consistent with the decline in marriage numbers, they are falling even more rapidly than in the United States and Europe. There is a sharp decline in the birth rate.
Mr Xiong referred to this element of population decline when he proposed providing adequate awareness and policy support for single-parent families. His other proposals are primarily aimed at allaying the fears of mothers of young women who fear that marriage and family will make them much more expensive to hire than men and undermine their career prospects. It was something I did.
of wall street journal (WSJ) report Announced that China’s population will decline in January accelerated In 2023, despite large-scale national and local policy developments aimed at increasing birth rates. The net loss of 2.08 million people in 2024 was more than double the loss in 2022, and fewer babies were born in 2023 than in 2023. half The number of births in 2016, the first year after China’s horrific “one child” population control policy was lifted.
of WSJ He cited economic uncertainty as one of the reasons why young people in China are reluctant to get married and have children. Net population declines may also be affected by the mortality rate from the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic, which is much higher than the Chinese government admits.
Citing data from the Development Research Center of the State Council of China, WSJ I got it:
China’s population is aging much earlier in its economic development than other major economies. China’s gross domestic product per capita in 2022, when the population first began to decline, was about $12,000, just over a third of Japan’s level when the population first started declining.
One policy measure that Chinese authorities have struggled to muster up the courage to implement is raising the retirement age in order to bring more older and experienced workers back into the dwindling workforce. is.
Japan used this technique to avoid the economic impact of population decline, but China has been reluctant to follow suit, even though the regime’s top advisers have publicly stated: Admitted Postponing retirement is a growing trend worldwide. China currently has one of the lowest retirement ages in the world: 60 for men, 55 for female office workers, and 50 for female blue-collar workers.
