The county of Changshan in eastern China is offering a “reward” of 1,000 yuan, which works out to a little under U.S. $140, to promote “age-appropriate marriage and child-bearing.” Happy couples can only collect the reward if the bride is 25 or younger.
China has already offered a panoply of awards and benefits for couples who have children, including increased benefits for child care and education to reduce the high cost of having kids. Changshan’s blunt offer of a cash bonus to men who marry young, fertile women is among the least subtle measures taken to reverse China’s catastrophic population decline.
Like many Asian cultures, China has stern attitudes toward children born out of wedlock – only a few years ago, unwed pregnant women were denied access to some public services and only recently have some provinces begun lifting restrictions on unmarried couples having children.
Encouraging more young people to get married has therefore become a priority for the Chinese government, as Australia’s ABC News noted on Tuesday:
China’s legal age limit for marriage is 22 for males and 20 for females, but the number of couples getting married has been falling.
That has driven down birth rates due to official policies which make it harder for single women to have children.
Marriage rates hit a record low in 2022 at 6.8 million, the lowest since 1986, according to government data released in June. There were 800,000 fewer marriages last year than in 2021.
None of these policy remedies have worked terribly well so far. The national fertility rate has only gone down since the regime in Beijing formally acknowledged its population crisis and began implementing policies to counter it.
In July, exasperated state media outlets berated childless Chinese subjects for “pedophobia,” floating a theory that stubbornly low birthrates are exacerbated by a sinister Internet conspiracy to make young couples afraid of having children. Being called pedophobes does not seem to have inspired the Chinese public to have more children.
The city of Xian tried sending text messages to its residents last week, urging them to get busy with baby-making on China’s version of Valentine’s Day. It is too early to tell if this approach will have a salutary effect on fertility rates.
A nurse holds a baby at an infant care centre in Yongquan, in Chongqing municipality, in southwest China. (STR/AFP/Getty Images)
Reuters on Tuesday was skeptical that Changshan’s little cash reward for young brides would reverse these trends, pointing to high childcare costs, the reluctance of young Chinese women to sacrifice their careers to become mothers, and “low consumer confidence and growing concerns over the health of China’s economy” as reasons for the demographic drop.
The effect of China’s real-estate crisis should not be underestimated, as gigantic property companies totter on the brink of collapse, unfinished housing projects litter the landscape, and young couples are increasingly unable to buy a home large enough to accommodate children.
Less frequently discussed is the lingering effect of China’s brutal One Child Policy of forced abortions, which dramatically reduced the pool of young women available for marriage and child-rearing, permanently ratcheted down the size of the typical Chinese family, and increased the amount of money well-off Chinese parents spend on the few children they do have – a “spillover” phenomenon that makes large families even more unaffordable for less affluent couples.