Will China Drop All Birth Restrictions? NewsWire

NewsWire: 7/8/21

• China is considering dropping all birth restrictions by 2025. This news comes just a few weeks after the country raised its current limits from two to three children. (The Wall Street Journal)
• NH: Over the last several years, China has been easing its birth restrictions. In 2016, they nixed the one-child policy and allowed couples to have two children. Then last month, the government announced that families will be allowed to have three children. (See “China Pins Its Future on a Three-Child Policy.”)
• Now there is talk of scrapping birth restrictions altogether. Official sources suggest that restrictions would first be waived in provinces with low fertility rates and that by 2025 the waivers would be extended nationwide. This news comes on the heels of China’s latest census, which showed the country heading towards dreaded population decline. (See "China's Population: A Mystery Wrapped in a Riddle.")
• My reaction?
• Yes, this is unquestionably where the CCP's birth policies are heading--away from family limitation and toward pronatalism. (See "China Says Goodbye to Family Planning.") But no, do not hold your breath for an overnight dismantling of all family controls.
• Keep in mind how nationally sensitive this issue is. For decades, the PRC vigorously enforced birth restrictions with draconian penalties, including massive fines, detentions, and involuntary sterilizations and abortions. Among their many tragic side effects, the penalties gave rise to the selling of baby girls on the black market. Millions of Chinese women retain searing memories of how they were treated. A sudden lifting of all controls would be a serious loss of face for the party. And it might trigger a popular backlash. It's one thing to be dragooned into sacrificing for the state. It's quite another to be informed, after the fact, that the sacrifice was pointless.
• Then there's the role of the National Health and Family Planning Commission to consider. This massive bureaucracy has many responsibilities, but its single biggest function is to enforce these family planning regulations. In so doing, it serves as a powerful means of social control--in effect, helping the CCP to supervise the lives of young families. Dismantling this guardian class may be easier said than done.
• The irony, of course, is that wiping out the remaining birth limits would at this point accomplish almost nothing. When China first raised the limit to two children for all women, the birthrate rose for a single year. Then it arced downward for the next four--at a time when the share of young women having no children was steeply rising and the share of births to women having two children continued to fall.
• Question: If most young women in China today see having two children as either undesirable or impractical, why does anyone expect many to have more than three?
• Sometime soon, watch for President Xi Jinping to announce a generous array of pronatal incentives for young families who have children, including cash subsidies, tax breaks, and civic privileges. Maybe, for good measure, he could subtract a few "social credits" from those families that don't have children. And to administer all of this? He has the Commission standing by, just waiting for new buttons to push and levers to pull.