China’s Baby-Boost Proposals Meet Public Resentment. NewsWire

NewsWire: 4/5/22

• Suggestions to boost the birthrate during China’s latest annual parliament meeting got a frosty reception online. Officials offered a wide range of suggestions, but netizens were less than enthusiastic. (Reuters)
  
• NH: At China’s annual meeting of its National People’s Congress last month, raising the birthrate was a hot topic. The nearly 3,000 delegates proposed more than 20 suggestions that ranged from the conventional (extending parental leave, helping young families secure housing, offering tax credits for childcare) to the less conventional (creating local “marriage committees” that offer matchmaking services, encouraging graduate students to get married and have children). One delegate even suggested offering the third child in a family 10 to 20 extra points on the university entrance exam.
• This isn’t the first time that “baby bonus” proposals have been discussed at the meeting. But this year’s NPC was the first since China introduced the three-child policy (see “China Pins Its Future on a Three-Child Policy”), and the public reaction on social media reflected a mix of incredulity and derision.
• “This is crazy, when it was the time of family planning there was forced sterilisation and abortion," one Weibo user wrote in a comment that received over 2,000 likes. "Now they want three children. Are women just machines?"  Another user griped: "So I'm studying a masters to birth a baby for you?”
• This undercurrent of resentment differentiates China’s campaign to raise the birthrate from similar campaigns in other countries. Plenty of nations are deliberating over the design of pronatalist birth incentives. But only in China is the discussion happening within a population that has just emerged from fifty years of perhaps the most draconian anti-natalist policies ever enacted.
• Older Chinese, especially women, can't help but feel bitter about the children they were never allowed to have--or were taken from them. Now suddenly the all-knowing national planners have decided that they had been steering the ship in the wrong direction for years, perhaps decades? So now we all have to do a 180? If offered cash or tax breaks, young couples will take them. But the entire experience will certainly not build confidence in the CCP. Indeed, I wouldn’t be surprised if much of this online derision is swiftly scrubbed from the internet.