Would Benefits for Unmarried Moms Help China Grow? NewsWire

NewsWire: 7/19/22

• China is awash in baby bonuses, but only if you’re married. Extending bonuses to single mothers would help reverse the country’s demographic freefall--but not by much. (The New York Times)
• NH: China has been piling on the baby bonuses. Cash, tax and housing credits, extended parental leave, educational benefits…the list goes on. (See “China Drafts New ‘Baby Boost’ Policies.”)
• These perks are only available to married couples. Wouldn’t China have a better chance of addressing its fertility woes, this piece asks, if it made the benefits available to single mothers?
• It would indeed. But, alas, it would not help very much. In China, there are in fact very few single mothers of childbearing age. The age-old social stigma against out-of-wedlock births remains very strong. When the National Health Commission declared in 2017 that out-of-wedlock births were "against the public order and against good morals,” they were merely summarizing this consensus. While the Chinese government does not keep track of out-of-wedlock births, Chinese demographers agree that such births are infrequent.
• To get some idea of just how infrequent they are, we can look at other Confucian societies, where the share of births to unmarried moms is quite small across the board even without government control over family planning. In South Korea, only 1.9% of children are born to unmarried moms; in Japan, 2.3%; in Taiwan, 4.0%. To put these numbers in perspective, the average across OECD countries is 41.0%.
• Western preconceptions about marriage, in short, cannot be applied to Confucian societies.
• To be sure, with China’s birthrate hovering around 1.15 (see “Births in China Continue to Fall”), the country arguably needs all the births that it can get. In recent years, a handful of single mothers in China have publicly fought, if unsuccessfully, for benefits and recognition. But it's not the lack of benefits that is keeping the number of unmarried mothers low. Nor would an extension of benefits do much to increase births.