Chinese women have had it. Their response to Beijing’s demands for more children? No.
Fed up with government harassment and wary of the sacrifices of child-rearing, many young women are putting themselves ahead of what Beijing and their families want. Their refusal has set off a crisis for the Communist Party, which desperately needs more babies to rejuvenate China’s aging population.
With the number of babies in free fall—fewer than 10 million were born in 2022, compared with around 16 million in 2012—China is headed toward a demographic collapse. China’s population, now around 1.4 billion, is likely to drop to just around half a billion by 2100, according to some projections. Women are taking the blame.
In October, Chinese Leader Xi Jinping urged the state-backed All-China Women’s Federation to “prevent and resolve risks in the women’s field,” according to an official account of the speech.
“It’s clear that he was not talking about risks faced by women but considering women as a major threat to social stability,” said Clyde Yicheng Wang, an assistant professor of politics at Washington and Lee University who studies Chinese government propaganda.
The State Council, China’s top government body, didn’t respond to questions about Beijing’s population policies.
There was a 1950s radio drama show called X-Minus One that adapted stories from a science fiction magazine. There’s a comedic one that is a surprising critique of capitalism in 1950s America called “Snowball Effect” [spoilers ahead] about an economics professor who comes up with a formula for unlimited growth and tests it out on a small women’s organization in a small town in Wisconsin. It starts working too rapidly, but he has built a flaw into the formula where the organization will quickly collapse if they stop getting new members. But it becomes so successful that the organization takes over the world. At the end of the episode, the world leader (who started as the president of the organization in the tiny Wisconsin town) announces that they are landing the first people on Mars to look for Martians because they desperately needed new members.
If you’re curious to listen, it’s #64 here- https://archive.org/details/OTRR_X_Minus_One_Singles