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CHINA has changed its earlier policy of penalizing couples who have more than a child to paying them by subsiding the costs of raising a child up to three years.
Zane Li was nine years old when he got a baby sister – and her arrival plunged the family in a small city in eastern China into crippling debt.
Under China’s stringent one-child policy at the time, Li’s parents were fined 100,000 yuan (about $13,900) for having a second child – nearly three times their annual income from selling fish at the local market.
“We were barely able to survive,” Li recalled. The then third-grader was forced to grow up overnight, taking on most of the housework and spending school holidays helping his mother at her stall.”
Now 25, Li says he has no plans to have children – a stance increasingly common for his generation and something that worries China’s government as it tries to avert a population crisis of its own making.
For decades, officials pressured couples to have fewer children, through hefty fines, forced abortions and sterilizations, only to now plead with Li’s generation to make more babies.
Last week, in the latest push to boost flagging birth rates, China announced it would offer parents an annual subsidy of 3,600 yuan ($500) for every child until age three, effective retroactively from January 1, 2025.
But for many young adults like Li, the offer falls flat.
“The cost of raising a child is enormous, and 3,600 yuan a year is a mere drop in the bucket,” said Li, who took out a student loan to study for a master’s degree in health services in Beijing.”
Raising a child to the age of 18 costs an average of 538,000 yuan ($75,000) in China, more than six times its GDP per capita – making it one of the most expensive places in the world to have children in relative terms, according to a recent study by the Beijing-based YuWa Population Research Institute.
In Shanghai, the cost soars past 1 million yuan, with Beijing close behind at 936,000 yuan.
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“(Having kids) would only bring more hardship. I’m not a capitalist or anything, and my kid probably wouldn’t have much of a good life either,” said Li, who’s anxious about his job prospects and contemplating pursuing a PhD.
Such a dim outlook on future parenthood – fueled by China’s slowing economy and soaring youth unemployment – presents a major hurdle to the government’s push for young people to get married and have children.
Faced with a shrinking workforce and a rapidly aging population, China scrapped its one-child policy in 2016, allowing couples to have two children, then three in 2021. But birth rates have continued to slide. The population has now been shrinking for three consecutive years despite a modest rebound in births last year, and experts are now warning of an even sharper decline.
CNN.
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