China’s in-your-face push for more babies

Source: NYT (10/8/24)
So, Are You Pregnant Yet? China’s In-Your-Face Push for More Babies.
The government is again trying to insert itself into women’s childbearing decisions, knocking on doors and making calls with questions some find downright invasive.
By Vivian Wang (Vivian Wang visited maternity hospitals and government family planning offices in Beijing and Nanjing to see how women were being prodded to have children.)

The first time a government worker encouraged Yumi Yang to have a baby, she thought little of it. She and her husband were registering their marriage at a local office in northeastern China, and the worker gave them free prenatal vitamins, which she chalked up to the government trying to be helpful.

When an official later called to ask if she had taken them, and then called again after she did get pregnant to track her progress, Ms. Yang shrugged those questions off as well intentioned, too. But then officials showed up at her door after she had given birth, asking to take a photograph of her with her baby for their files. That was too much.

“When they came to my home, that was really ridiculous,” said Ms. Yang, 28. “I felt a little disgusted.”

Faced with a declining population that threatens economic growth, the Chinese government is responding with a time-tested tactic: inserting itself into this most intimate of choices for women, whether or not to have a child.

Officials are not just going door to door to ask women about their plans. They have partnered with universities to develop courses on having a “positive view of marriage and childbearing.” At high-profile political gatherings, officials are spreading the message wherever they can.

“I always feel, as a woman, if you’ve done your time on this earth and haven’t given birth to another life, that’s a real pity,” Gao Jie, a delegate from the All-China Women’s Federation, told reporters during a national meeting of lawmakers in Beijing this year.

At the very least, the in-your-face approach makes it harder for women to tune out calls by China’s leader, Xi Jinping, to get married and have babies. To some, it is outright invasive; on social media, women have complained about being approached by neighborhood officials, including some who they said called to ask the date of their last menstrual cycle.

Mr. Xi, who has overseen a crackdown on feminist activism, has said that promoting childbirth as a national priority is one step toward ensuring that women “always walk with the party.” (The country’s total fertility rate, a measure of the number of children a woman is expected to have over her lifetime, is among the world’s lowest. The rate is estimated at around 1.0, compared to 1.62 in the United States last year.)

The fertility campaign is also a reminder that the Chinese Communist Party has a long history of imposing its will on people’s reproductive decisions. For decades starting in the 1970s, it enforced a one-child policy, sometimes brutally. Officials fined couples who had unauthorized pregnancies and even forced some women to undergo abortions.

As China’s economy developed, the party stepped back somewhat, though it never relinquished authority altogether, ruling in 2021 that couples could have three children.

Now, it is rushing back into view.

To understand what these efforts look like, The New York Times visited multiple maternity hospitals, along with several neighborhoods where officials have highlighted their attempts to promote fertility. Of 10 women we spoke to, seven said they had been asked by officials if they planned to have children.

For many women, the government’s nagging seemed out of step with their concerns, as well as outdated. It failed to address the high cost of raising children and how they would juggle motherhood alongside their careers and other ambitions.

“We’re not like people born in the 1970s or ’80s. Everyone knows that people born after the ’90s generally don’t want kids,” Ms. Yang said. “Whether you want to have children is a very private issue.”

To the party, such comments are precisely why the new efforts — which have been labeled a campaign for a “new marriage and childbearing culture” — are so important.

“Some people believe that marriage and childbirth are only private matters, and up to each individual. This view is wrong and one-sided,” a government-run family planning association in Mudanjiang, a city of about two million in northern China, said in a news release this year.

The heart of the work falls to government family planning associations, a network with hundreds of thousands of offshoots embedded in villages, workplaces and city neighborhoods. For decades, overseen by a national association, they were the main bodies that enforced the one-child policy.

But now, they are working instead to promote the so-called new fertility culture.

In Miyun, a district of Beijing with about 500,000 residents, local family planning officials have set up a 500-person propaganda team to promote the cause, according to an article published last year by the national association.

The team had contacted more than half of Miyun’s “suitably aged” couples at least six times, the article said. It also installed new artwork in a park: a life-size cutout of a man and woman walking with three children, under a slogan urging couples not to wait too long to have children.

The article also said that officials’ bonuses would be pegged to how successfully they promoted the new culture, though it did not specify how performance would be measured. Miyun officials declined an interview request.

Zhang Rongxing, 38, who was walking with her preschool-age son near the artwork on a recent morning, said that local officials had asked both over the phone and in person if she was planning on having another child.

She was not. The two she already had were enough. “It’s too much work,” she said. “Mentally, financially, in terms of time.”

The efforts to track and influence women’s fertility plans can begin even before marriage. Many cities offer free premarital health examinations, where couples are screened for hereditary diseases and told they should ideally have children before turning 35. Several women said officials called them soon after they underwent the health examinations to tell them to collect free folic acid, a prenatal supplement.

Officials remain involved throughout pregnancies, too. Government websites instruct women to register their pregnancies at community health centers, which are overseen by the local government.

At a maternity hospital in Beijing, Yang Yingying, 34, said community workers had checked in throughout her pregnancy. “They say things like, I see that you’re due for an exam,” she said.

Some women told The Times they appreciated the outreach because they felt cared for. Women have also lauded other parts of the pro-fertility campaign, which include expanding child-care resources and encouraging men to help out at home.

Even those who found the questions from officials invasive said they were easy to ignore. There is no sign that the government intervention has come close to the excesses of the one-child era.

Nor is it likely to, given the political backlash it would incur, said Wang Feng, a demography expert at the University of California, Irvine.

Still, the government’s rhetoric about childbearing being a public responsibility showed that its overall mind-set, of trying to control women’s fertility choices, had not changed, he added.

“It’s exactly the same mentality as when they implemented birth controls,” Professor Wang said. “The government is, I would say, totally oblivious of how society has moved beyond them.”

Some scholars, activists and ordinary women have worried that the government could move more forcefully to limit women’s choices. The central government has pledged in several recent health plans to reduce “medically unnecessary abortions,” setting off social media frenzies from those who worried that access to the procedure could be restricted.

The government has not specified what it defines as medically unnecessary, and it has made similar promises for over a decade. China has one of the world’s highest abortion rates, in part because the one-child policy made the procedure widely available. There have not been widespread reports of new obstacles. But the government’s increasingly urgent calls for more children have left many women wary.

Those fears are heightened by the fact that, in some places, abortion access is already overseen not only by doctors but also by officials, who may have considerations other than purely medical ones. Some cities require any woman who is 14 or more weeks pregnant to obtain permission from her local family planning department before obtaining an abortion.

The requirement emerged in the 2000s to prevent parents from aborting female fetuses, a practice that was prevalent during the one-child era. But in the city of Nanjing, one of the places with such a rule, officials at two family planning offices said they tried to discourage applicants generally.

The officials, who did not give their names because they were not authorized to give interviews, said they had not received any explicit guidance to do so. But they both mentioned the government’s shift to a three-child policy, and young people’s reluctance to have more children.

On one office’s windows, 14 different posters promoted marriage and childbirth. “Life is the continuation of love,” one poster said, showing a young couple playing with three children.

Siyi Zhao contributed research.

Vivian Wang is a China correspondent based in Beijing, where she writes about how the country’s global rise and ambitions are shaping the daily lives of its people. More about Vivian Wang