After 'one-child policy', China emphasises on a 'pro-birth agenda' to tackle shrinking population

Amid China's ongoing demographic crisis, the new 'pro-birth agenda' set up by the Communist Party does not go along well with the country's women, who have faced the horrors of Beijing's 'one-child rule' previously.

Beijing has been launching nationwide programs to promote a "pro-birth culture" since the country's three-child policy was implemented in 2021. This is because China's population is shrinking at an alarming rate.

The slogans and posters that originally cautioned against having more than one kid have been replaced with ones that promote having more babies.

A flurry of policy incentives, including cash giveaways, real estate subsidies, and the extension of maternity leave, have been implemented by local governments. However, nothing seems to work, as the women in China, now, are not interested in having children.

One such case, which highlights the negative impacts of child policies in China, is that of Fang. Since her pre-school days, she was officially registered as the daughter of her eldest uncle. This happened, as her parents tried to conceal their second pregnancy, in order to avoid harsh penalties, including the loss of a job. At that time, China's controversial rule of 'one-child' was in enforcement from 1980-2015.

"I really had no idea which parents I was supposed to name," Fang told CNN years later, using a pseudonym for privacy reasons.

Since then, to avert an impending demographic crisis, Beijing has gradually raised the birth quotas from one to two children, then to three in 2021.

The one-child policy is no longer in effect, but the scars from the past continue to linger. A new generation of women, like Fang, is reluctant to become parents because they were traumatised by the hardships of their parents and by the sacrifices they made as one-child citizens. This makes Beijing's present pro-birth campaign difficult to support.

Yao, who is 25 years old and the eldest of three siblings, requested that CNN only use her last name out of concern for her privacy. She had a similar upbringing that was ruined by the policy.

During the single-child policy's reign, she was born in a remote village in northern Shandong, one of the 19 provinces that permitted rural couples to have a second child--as long as the first child was female.

According to a prestigious Chinese academic research released last year, this variation of the "one-and-a-half child policy," which was implemented in 1984, implied that girls were only "half" as valuable as boys, reinforcing the traditional Chinese preference for sons, CNN reported.

Yao's mother became pregnant with her third child, a forbidden one, and quickly left the village with Yao's sister, leaving Yao in the care of her grandparents.

Yao's first sibling was a girl, who was permitted by the rules. Yao claimed that in order to prevent a possible forced abortion, her mother was compelled to conceal her pregnancy. She attempted to formally register the "extra baby" as her son after he arrived, but she had to pay a hefty charge of 50,000 yuan (about USD7,000), reported CNN.

Probably the most horrifying aspect of China's one-child "social engineering" is forced abortion and sterilisation, which has permanently altered the physical and emotional health of hundreds of millions of Chinese women.

Furthermore, financial concerns frequently take centre stage in online debates in China regarding birth choices.

However, some users have also poked fun at the nation's one-child policy by posting old invoices for over-quota birth fines on Xiaohongshu, China's equivalent of Instagram.