Money weighs on would-be Chinese parents as population falls

SHANGHAI: Young Chinese are increasingly hesitant to start families, citing economic concerns exacerbated by rigid social norms around child-rearing, even as their government grows desperate to boost the birth rate and stave off a demographic crisis.

China´s population decline accelerated in 2023, official figures released on Wednesday showed, shrinking by more than two million people. Long alarmed by falling fertility, the government has relaxed its decades-long one-child policy in recent years to allow three children per family, while rolling out subsidies and calling on women to become homemakers.

But the incentives and exhortations are doing little to change what demographers describe as an economic crisis in the making, as the number of working adults shrinks while a booming contingent of retirees chips away at finite social security funds.

Twenty-six-year-old Xiaopeng works at a Shanghai event space that hosts classes and parties for children, but said he prefers his pets to having children of his own.

“For me, children could be a bit more difficult, with all the practical concerns you have to consider,” he told AFP. Childbirth in China usually comes after a wallet-draining process of buying a home, finding a spouse, and paying for a lavish wedding, with government policy penalising births out of wedlock despite recent moves in some regions to support unwed mothers.

Parents then race to ensure their children excel at school and university to succeed in the cut-throat jobs market, feeding a massive afterschool tuition market that the government has cracked down on with limited success.

The average cost in 2019 of raising a child in China from birth to age 18 was 485,000 yuan ($68,000), according to Beijing-based thinktank YuWa Population Research. That was nearly seven times the country´s GDP per capita that year -- a ratio far exceeding the United States´ 4.11 or Australia´s 2.08.

That does not include the apartment that parents are often expected to help sons buy to secure a bride.

“For my friends, if they have a stable job and their careers are stable... they will start to want children,” Xiaopeng said. “For me, I feel like raising pets is more appropriate than raising a child.”