Women may hold up half the sky, as Chinese Communist Party founder Mao Zedong once famously declared, but these days they must do so while also holding a baby — or preferably three — in their arms at the same time.
Since the end of the disastrous “one child policy” a decade ago, Chinese authorities have tried with increasing desperation to boost the country’s birth rate: They allowed families to have two children. Then three. They encouraged people to get married, and made it harder to get divorced. They’ve offered tax incentives to have babies and financial support for raising them.
When these efforts failed, the authorities moved to more punitive measures like taxing condoms and making it harder to get abortions and vasectomies. Family planning officials — once responsible for keeping birth numbers low — intrusively call women of childbearing age every month to ask why they’re not pregnant yet.
Beijing’s abject failure to boost the birth rate was underscored this month when official data showed only 7.9 million babies were born in China last year, down 17 percent from 2024, falling to the lowest level since Mao established the People’s Republic of China in 1949.
The issue risks turning into an existential crisis for Beijing, which sees a growing economy with a large workforce as critical to enabling China to realize leader Xi Jinping’s vision to eclipse the United States as a superpower. The unfolding demographic crash is on course to slash China’s working-age population as the overall population ages, straining the health care and pension systems.
Now, experts are worried that Chinese authorities may be tempted to return to their former habits and use the machinery of the state to bludgeon demographic trends to their will.
China’s large population-planning bureaucracy is “currently being repurposed in the service of the state’s new pronatalist goals,” said Carl Minzner, a senior fellow in China studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.
“Party authorities are steering China back to an earlier, more patriarchal era with respect to women,” Minzner said. “I’m particularly worried what might happen if Chinese authorities decide to prioritize China’s demographic future as a political imperative.”
First instituted in 1979 as China’s population neared a billion, the one-child program led to an entire generation of only children. To keep the population low, family planning officials oversaw forced sterilizations and abortions, imposed crippling fines for excess births, surveilled women, and kidnapped children.
When it became clear that the birth rate was in sharp decline, Beijing in January 2016 reversed course, allowing two births per family. It made no difference. Only five years later, another pronouncement came from Beijing: Couples should now aim to have three children.
Minzner said Chinese authorities might set out explicit fertility targets and make them part of performance evaluation systems for local officials.
There is already some evidence that the authorities are considering doing this.
There have been reports of Communist Party attempts to tie cadres’ careers to the size of their own families.
In one case, the health commission in the southern city of Quanzhou urged party members and officials to take the lead in having three children, according to a policy proposal leaked to Jiemian News, a state-affiliated news site, in 2024. Local authorities later said the document was an internal draft and that they would decide later whether to release it publicly.
While local officials were the key drivers of abuses during the one-child years, then as now they were responding to policy set in Beijing.
Xi has begun emphasizing pronatalist policies, even if it means a rethinking of his own pronouncements about the status of women in Chinese society. China’s women, Xi said in 2023, must not only think of their own work but should “actively cultivate a new culture of marriage and childbearing” based on “national development and national progress.”
China’s fertility rate currently hovers around one child per woman of childbearing age, far below the replacement rate of about two needed to maintain a stable population.
China’s population has fallen for four consecutive years, and the pace of decline has been worsening: Official statistics showed a net loss of 3.4 million people last year, taking the population count to 1.4 billion.
Most demographers forecast the population dropping to about 500 million or 600 million by 2100, though the demographer Yi Fuxian, who studies China’s demographics at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, believes it could fall to as low as 330 million.
The reality for women in China today is a far cry from the ideals of equality laid out by Mao. Instead, women are increasingly being viewed as baby-making machines, activists and scholars say.
“The relaxation of the one-child policy did not create a fertility recovery,” said Yun Zhou, a demographer at the University of Michigan who specializes in China’s population policies. “What it did create was intensified labor market discrimination for women.”
Zhou cites as an example the case of China’s generous maternity leave, which can last up to a year. Instead of encouraging women to give birth, the policy is making it much more difficult for women to get and maintain jobs because of fears that they might leave their jobs to start a family.
It is not matched by an equally generous paternity leave policy, Zhou said. “So even at the hiring stage, there is intense preference for men, and women must navigate these discriminations, not only while they are on the job, but also before they even get the job.”
The promotion of marriage and increased barriers to divorce have also had a significant impact.
For the Communist Party, marriage is deeply important as a “a guarantor of social stability,” said Leta Hong Fincher, a journalist and writer who has penned several studies on the repression of feminism in China. In a country where the vast majority of children are born to married couples, it also goes hand in hand with fertility.
But the number of marriages has also experienced a precipitous drop in recent years, Hong Fincher said, with a record low 6 million registered in the most recent figures, from 2024, less than half the 2013 number.
Another new policy proving severely detrimental to Chinese women is the government’s imposition in 2020 of a “cooling-off period” of 30 days before courts could grant divorce petitions.
The online reaction was swift and furious, with people arguing that the cooling-off period can trap women in abusive relationships.
Their predictions proved all too prescient. In July 2023, a husband stabbed his wife to death during a meeting arranged during the 30-day cooling-off period. And in May 2024, a man in Guizhou poisoned his 10-year-old son and 7-year-old daughter with pesticide during the cooling-off period.
During annual legislative meetings last year, Jiang Shengnan, one of the few women active in high-level Chinese politics, proposed eliminating the “divorce cooling-off period” clause from the Civil Code. Her proposal failed to gain any traction.
In China, “officials just do not respect women” or women’s rights when making policy, said Li Maizi, a feminist and LGBT activist who was one of the “Feminist Five” arrested and detained for their activities in 2015. She now lives in New York City.
This could turn out to be even more self-defeating for a Communist Party trying to grow its population, Minzner said. It could be, he said, a recipe for “angering an entire generation of young Chinese women, polarizing gender relations between men and women yet further, and causing marriage and fertility rates to crash to global lows.”
Rudy Lu contributed to this report.
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