‘“We were wrong, we made a mistake”—of course the Chinese Communist Party would never say that.’
Commuters wear protective masks as they exit a train at a subway station during Monday rush hour on April 13, 2020 in Beijing, China. According to the statistics of the World Health Organization, as of today, the cumulative number of confirmed cases of COVID-19 has exceeded 1.69 million, including 106,138 deaths. (Photo by Lintao Zhang/Getty Images)
By Dorothy Li and Steve Lance
China may begin a campaign of forced pregnancy, ordering young couples to get married and have more babies if the demographic challenges become more serious, according to Steven Mosher, president of the Population Research Institute.
Data from China’s National Statistics Bureau, released on Jan. 17, show that just 9.02 million babies were born last year—the seventh straight year that number has fallen. It has now hit the lowest level since the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) seized control of China in 1949.
The CCP adopted the policy of allowing families to have three babies in 2021. Local authorities across the nation have also introduced incentives to encourage couples to have children. Options include tax deductions, housing subsidies, and free education in state schools.
These measures are expected to have limited effects, according to Mr. Mosher, who was among the first U.S. social scientists who worked in China after Washington normalized diplomatic ties with Beijing in 1979. To stem the ongoing demographic decline, every woman would have to have three children, given that decades of a one-child policy and a traditional preference for sons have resulted in fewer women of childbearing age now.
“I can’t think of any combination of bribes or incentives that could induce young women to marry and have those children,” Mr. Mosher said during a recent interview with NTD, sister media outlet of The Epoch Times.
Although China has gone from punishing couples for having too many children to encouraging them to have more, it may not be easy to change how the public views big families after decades of indoctrination.
“For the last 30, 40 years, they’ve been told that children are burdens and not blessings; they’ve been told that everybody should have fewer children for the sake of the country. Now all of a sudden, you can’t turn on a dime and say, start having children,” Mr. Mosher said.
“‘We were wrong, we made a mistake’—of course the Chinese Communist Party would never say that.”
The CCP’s push to boost national birthrates comes as its economic growth rate slowed to one of the lowest levels in decades in 2023, official data released earlier this month show. The weak economy and high unemployment rate deter young Chinese from having babies, he said.
“Young people without hope for the future, without jobs, without the ability to start businesses, are not going to get married and have children,” Mr. Mosher said.
With fewer babies born in recent decades, more Chinese are now growing old. One in five people in the country were ages 60 and older last year, official data show. The working-age population—those between ages 16 and 59—accounted for only 61 percent of the total population in 2023, down from more than 70 percent almost a decade ago.
Facing a quickly aging, shirking population, Mr. Mosher said he’s worried that the regime’s officials may take the family planning drive to new and opposite extremes.
“I’m very much afraid, though, that the Chinese Communist Party will not stop at incentives; that at one point in time, if the situation gets more and more serious, as I think it will, the Chinese Communist Party will say to young women: ‘We are now ordering you to get married and ordering you to have children. Here is your quota for births of three, and you must produce these children within the next six years,’” he said.
“Now that sounds outrageous, of course, it’s outrageous.”
But it’s no more outrageous than the one-child policy that ran from the 1980s to 2016, Mr. Mosher said, calling the rule the “worst offense against humanity in China.”
For decades, China strictly limited most couples to just one baby. Children who were born outside the one-child plan wouldn’t be able to get hukou, a household registration document for Chinese citizens to attend school, work in state-run companies, marry, or even open a bank account. Many women who violated the family planning policy were punished with forced abortion or sterilization.
“Hundreds of millions of unborn Chinese children never saw the light of day because their mothers were forcibly aborted at four, six, eight, even nine months of pregnancy, and [they were] sometimes killed after birth,” Mr. Mosher said.
“I think the population decline is being driven by the Chinese Communist Party.”
Dorothy Li is a reporter for The Epoch Times, covering China’s politics, international relationships, security, and society. Contact Dorothy at dorothy.li@epochtimes.nyc.