A leaked internal draft document from the municipal health authority in the southeastern Chinese city of Quanzhou floating measures to encourage officials and government employees to have three children to boost flagging birth rates has sparked heated debate on social media.
The document, which circulated online in the form of a screenshot before being identified as a leaked draft by the Quanzhou Municipal Health Commission, lists a number of ways being considered by city officials to "organize and implement the three-child policy."
China scrapped its policy limiting most couples to just one child in 2015, following decades of human rights abuses, including forced late-term abortions and sterilizations, as well as widespread monitoring of women's fertility by officials.
Couples were then limited to two children, but by 2020, the fertility rate stood at around 1.3 children per woman in 2020, compared with the 2.1 children per woman needed for the population to replace itself, and the limit was raised to three in May 2021.
Yet the people who do most of the mental, physical and emotional work of child-bearing and childcare -- China's women -- have been reluctant to step up to solve the government's population problems despite claims from Communist Party leader Xi Jinping that they have an "irreplaceable" role to play in the "rejuvenation of the Chinese nation."
The leaked Quanzhou document, which was confirmed by health officials as a genuine leak by "negligent" staff in comments reported by Jiemian News, goes a little further than sloganeering, calling on officials lead by example and have more children themselves, while proposing an array of support services to help them.
"Party members and cadres at all levels and cadres of state-owned enterprises benefiting from [connections to government] business units should take the lead in implementing the three-child policy," the document says in a section titled "key tasks and measures."
That would include the families of officials and employees working throughout the municipal government and party committee system, as well as state-owned enterprises with connections to Quanzhou or the counties under its jurisdiction, according to a screenshot from the document circulating widely on social media this week.
It also calls for " eugenics" and post-natal care. While eugenics originated as a socialist, progressive movement, it has become closely linked in some countries to discrimination against minority groups, often based on ethnicity or disability, using "scientific" rationales, according to a 2020 article by Leo Lucassen in the International Review of Social History.
Heated online discussion
In Nazi Germany, women deemed "fit" to have children by the authorities were banned from having abortions, according to Lisa Pine's 1997 book Nazi Family Policy, 1933–1945.
While no overt plan to force people to have children has yet been tabled in China, the screenshot sparked heated online discussion, according to Jiemian News, because "some people feared it was a veiled reference to forcing people to have three children."
Blogger Tuzao Ershan commented that if the policy is implemented, officials who don't have three kids "can forget about getting promoted or getting rich," while blogger Xiao Lu Jie said there are two main ways for Chinese people to demonstrate their patriotism: spend money and have kids.
"Nothing wrong with party members and officials taking the lead by having kids, because it's an important way to demonstrate patriotism," the blogger wrote. "They should just set up a birth-promotion bureau."
Another blog post seen by RFA Mandarin said that the families of officials who responded to the call to have a second child in 2015 are already struggling.
"It reminds me of what happened to a lot of my classmates ... who are now couples with four elderly parents and two kids who have to make loan payments, raise their kids and also take care of medical treatment and health issues for their elders," blogger Chuanfu Buhuo wrote. "It really doesn't bear thinking about."
Xi Jinping told the All-China Women's Federation in 2023 that Chinese women should be mobilized "to contribute to China's modernization."
"The role of women in the ... great cause of national rejuvenation ... is irreplaceable," he said.
The pressure to boost births comes as young people in China are increasingly avoiding marriage, having children and buying a home amid a tanking economy and rampant youth unemployment.
The number of Chinese couples getting married for the first time tumbled 8.3% in the first quarter of 2024, while first marriages have plummeted by nearly 56% over the past nine years, according to the 2023 China Statistical Yearbook.
That's contributing to a sharp decline in birthrates and a shrinking, aging population – a trend that the United Nations projects will lead China's population to contract from 1.4 billion to 800 million by 2100.
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Passive resistance
Current affairs commentator Fang Yuan said the official pressure to have more children is part of the planned economy and social control system being implemented by Xi.
But he said it wouldn't bear fruit for at least another couple of decades.
"You need at least 20 years to raise a generation," Fang said. "Their expectation that the population structure will be optimized immediately, and that major long-term problems like low productivity and an aging population will be solved immediately ... is wishful thinking and unrealistic."
He said such a scheme is unlikely to succeed in the absence of huge subsidies from the government, because of the sheer cost of raising children in today's China.
Without substantial financial help, it'll be a case of passive resistance to top-down policy from further down the ranks, Fang said.
Economist Si Ling said party members and government officials make up around 7% of China's population, which is likely not enough to solve China's population problem, even if all of them complied.
"Short of financial resources, the Chinese government has discovered that it still needs to rely on foreign investment to drive economic growth," Si said. "But it no longer has the ability to make concessions in terms of administrative fees and taxation rates."
He said that any attempt to put pressure on officials to have more children will fail if the cost of subsidizing those children isn't fully worked out in advance.
"All it can offer is cheap labor ... so the Chinese government needs people to have more children to attract foreign investment, but this is a false proposition, as it’s almost impossible to achieve in the short term," he said.
Translated by Luisetta Mudie.