China: the “three children” family policy is a failure.

As the SCMP reports, the Communist Party of China's population policy is failing, putting a guess on the nation's future. Few Chinese parents seem to want three children, nearly a year and a half after the government introduced the three-child policy to boost the falling fertility rate, according to polls.
In Guangzhou, a prosperous city in southern China, for example, only 9 percent of residents want to have three or more children, according to a survey conducted by the Guangdong Academy of Population Development in November and December last year. Survey results, released in August, showed that more than 80 per cent of 23,323 respondents wanted one or more children, and most wanted two, but three clearly seems excessive.
According to the study, parents cited the heavy economic burden of raising children, insufficient time and energy, and work pressure as the main barriers to having more children.
According to experts, while fertility intentions can predict children's behavior, they can also overestimate the fertility rate.
"Wanting to have two children is very common in China, as in many other countries such as Japan and South Korea, but it is an ideal circumstance, which most people cannot realistically afford or achieve," he said. said Jiang Quanbao, professor of demography at Xian Jiaotong University.
“Especially now, the number of births in China is very likely to decrease further this year” according to the professor, which means a probable population decline in 2022.
The last time China saw deaths outnumber births was in 1960, during the Great Famine of China, according to data from the National Bureau of Statistics.
A similar survey, conducted in the capital Beijing last year, revealed that out of 2,060 people aged between 18 and 50, only 4.2 per cent said there was a "high probability" of having three children, while more than 80% said there was a "small chance".

However, the polls show an important point: the social and economic policies of the State can improve the willingness of families to have children, showing a way out of the problem which, however, can clash with budgetary constraints.
“This means that meeting the reproductive needs of the population is an important measure to increase the willingness to have children,” the report reads.
In the northwestern province of Shaanxi, a survey conducted last year showed that nearly 70 percent of 417 respondents were reluctant or unwilling to have three children, while only 7.3 percent were in favor of having three children.
According to the report published in February, women are more reluctant to have three children than men, young people are more reluctant to have three children than middle-aged ones and the higher the level of education, the less willingness to have three children.

So it's not enough to relax the old one-child policies and then tell people that three daughters is fine. We need to do more, both economically and morally. If modern societies want to survive, they need to completely rethink their attitude towards families, helping them financially and then providing incentives, even financially, for policies in favor of prolificacy, and perhaps also reviewing the basic ethics of society.

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The article China: the "three children" family policy is a failure. comes from Economic Scenarios .

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This is a machine translation of a post published on Scenari Economici at the URL https://scenarieconomici.it/cinala-politica-famigliare-dei-tre-figli-e-un-fallimento/ on Fri, 30 Dec 2022 07:00:47 +0000.