Bucking tradition, young Chinese are choosing to focus on themselves over starting a family

Success in China has traditionally been tied to marriage and parenthood amid societal pressures to have children.

But younger Chinese are increasingly forging their own path as they seek to break away from what some see as constraints on their lives.

Zhang Yanxin, a 28-year-old high school teacher in Xiamen, Fujian province, says younger Chinese are typically more concerned with focusing on themselves before having children.

“It’s hard to sustain a satisfactory quality of life once you have children because your life becomes consumed by them,” Zhang says. “If we choose to have children, it comes at the expense of losing our individuality.

“(My boyfriend and I) haven’t made up our minds completely about having kids, but we both agree that children are not essential if we do get married.”

Zhang’s sentiments align with many of the country’s youth as they express growing uncertainty about the benefits of having children.

Such doubts have almost certainly been behind the country’s declining birthrate in recent years, a trend underlined by China’s announcement of its first population drop since the early 1960s last month.

On Jan. 17, the government unveiled figures that showed the country’s population declining by 850,000 to 1.41 billion people in 2022. What’s more, China’s birthrate fell to 6.77 births for every 1,000 people in 2022, down from 7.52 births in 2021, reaching its lowest point since 1949.

A recent survey by the China Family Planning Association and other leading institutions revealed that many of the country’s youth want to establish a career and accumulate wealth before starting a family.

Yin Jianghao, who works in the gaming industry in Chengdu, says economic factors typically lie at the heart of many couple’s decisions to delay having children.

“The cost of living has increased dramatically in terms of keeping up with everyone’s mortgage and car repayments,” Yin says, adding that the burden of supporting both sets of elderly parents falls on the couple’s shoulders, as they both hail from single-child households.

“If we wish to have children, we need to think about the high cost of education, the time we spend on child care and the financial burden of sustaining a three-member household,” the 27-year-old says.

The financial burden of having children has also been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, says Chen Feinian, a sociologist at Johns Hopkins University, as it has created uncertainty “in terms of health risks, access to health care and economic uncertainty.”

In traditional Chinese culture, children are typically viewed as something of an insurance policy for being looked after in retirement.

But many of the country’s youth don’t view parenthood in the same way, with Yin saying many elect not to have children if they aren’t pressured by their parents.

With young, well-educated women losing interest in parenthood, the government has launched several initiatives in a bid to encourage young couples to start a family. The country’s decadeslong one-child policy has been abandoned, while parents are now entitled to receive tax relief, subsidies for child care and longer leave.

But Stuart Gietel-Basten of Khalifa University, who specializes in population and demography in Asia, says cash incentives from the government fail to address two fundamental cultural issues that are discouraging women from having children.

Gietel-Basten says married women with children face discrimination in the workplace, while men continue to shun helping out with child care.

He says government policy and demographic trends are out of step with each other, a gap that cannot be fixed by simply increasing the country’s birthrate.

“Having more babies doesn’t fix a pension fund,” he says. “Similarly, having more babies does not automatically raise taxes and increase productivity.”

Chen believes a better approach would be to look at how Nordic countries are tackling gender inequality.

“Going by their experiences, policies that address gender equality in the workplace, encourage a family-friendly and flexible workplace, and greater acceptance for births outside of marriage could be more effective as a means to raising birthrates,” she says.