China may begin a campaign of forced pregnancy, ordering young couples to get married and have more babies if the demographic challenges become more serious, according to Steven Mosher, president of the Population Research Institute.
Data from China’s National Statistics Bureau, released on Jan. 17, showed that just 9.02 million babies were born last year—the seventh straight year that number has fallen. It has now hit the lowest level since the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) seized control of China in 1949.
The CCP adopted the policy of allowing families to have three babies in 2021. Local authorities across the nation have also introduced incentives to encourage couples to have children. Options include tax deductions, housing subsidies, as well as free education in state schools.
The effects of these measures are expected to be limited, according to Mr. Mosher, who was among the first U.S. social scientists who worked in China after Washington normalized the diplomatic ties with Beijing in 1979. To stem the ongoing demographic decline, every woman would have to have three children, given that decades of one-child policy and a traditional preference for sons have resulted in fewer women of childbearing age now.
“I can’t think of any combination of bribes or incentives that could induce young women to marry and have those children,” Mr. Mosher said during a recent interview with NTD, a sister media of The Epoch Times.
Although China has gone from punishing couples for having too many children to encouraging them to have more, it may not be easy to change how the public views big families after decades of indoctrination.
“For the last 30, 40 years, they’ve been told that children are burdens and not blessings; they’ve been told that everybody should have fewer children for the sake of the country. Now all of a sudden, you can’t turn on a dime and say, start having children,” Mr. Mosher said.
“‘We were wrong, we made a mistake’—of course the Chinese Communist Party would never say that,” he added.
The CCP’s push to boost national birthrates comes as its economic growth rate slowed to one of the lowest levels in decades last year, official data released earlier this month shows. The weak economy and high unemployment rate, according to Mr. Mosher, may also deter young Chinese from having babies.
“Young people without hope for the future, without jobs, without the ability to start businesses, are not going to get married and have children,” he said.
With fewer babies born in recent decades, more Chinese are now growing old. One in five in the country were aged 60 and above last year, official data shows. The working-age population, those aged between 16 and 59 years old, accounted for only 61 percent of the total population in 2023—down from over 70 percent almost a decade ago.
Facing a quickly aging, shirking population, Mr. Mosher said he worried the regime’s officials may take the family planning drive to new and opposite extremes.
“I’m very much afraid, though, that the Chinese Communist Party will not stop at incentives; that at one point in time, if the situation gets more and more serious, as I think it will, the Chinese Communist Party will say to young women, ‘We are now ordering you to get married and ordering you to have children. Here is your quota for births of three, and you must produce these children within the next six years.'”
“Now that sounds outrageous, of course, it’s outrageous,” but it’s no more outrageous than the one-child policy that ran from the 1980s to 2016, he said, calling the rule the “worst offense against humanity in China.”
For decades, China strictly limited most couples to just one baby. Children who were born outside the one-child plan wouldn’t be able to get hukou, a household registration document for Chinese citizens to attend school, work in state-run companies, marry, or even open a bank account. Many more women who violated the family planning policy were punished with forced abortion or sterilization.
“Hundreds of millions of unborn Chinese children never saw the light of day because their mothers were forcibly aborted at four, six, eight, even nine months of pregnancy, and sometimes killed after birth.”
“I think the population decline is being driven by the Chinese Communist Party,” he said.
From The Epoch Times