A Chinese state-run news site published, then deleted, an editorial in recent days that argued every Chinese Communist Party (CCP) member should have three children to help reverse China’s declining birth rate, the Guardian reported Thursday.
China Reports Network reportedly published an article last month urging all CCP members, of whom there are roughly 95 million, to “shoulder the responsibility and obligation of the country’s population growth and act on the three-child policy.”
“No party member should use any excuse, objective or personal, to not marry or have children, nor can they use any excuse to have only one or two children,” the editorial advised, according to the Guardian.
The piece proved controversial and received heavy criticism in its comments section. China Reports Network removed the article from its website in response to the severe backlash.
“Despite the editorial being deleted, people shared screenshots of the piece millions of times on Chinese social media network Weibo and raised their concerns,” Britain’s Independent newspaper noted on December 10.
The U.K.’s Guardian newspaper published one such reaction to the China Reports Network editorial on December 9.
“Although the three-child policy has come out, many people don’t have the conditions, ability, money or time to take care of children, especially for women, who have to go home early, and this will make more companies not want to hire women,” the comment, written and posted to social media by an unidentified person, read.
“Shouldn’t society be balanced in development? When does it become a mandatory rule to have three children?” the netizen asked.
China’s ruling Communist Party announced new guidelines in May that allow married couples to have up to three children. The nation’s federal government approved the “three-child policy” in response to China’s 2020 census data, which revealed a drastic decline in the country’s birth rate. Demographers documented 12 million births in China in 2020, a figure “sharply down from 14.65 million in 2019 and the lowest since 1961,” Reuters reported on May 11.
The CCP caused China’s birth rate to plummet over the past four decades by enforcing a strict “one-child policy.” The Communist Party severely limited the size of Chinese families starting in the late 1970s in an effort to control what was, at the time, an exploding population. China’s federal government eased the policy in 2016, allowing couples to have up to two children, and again in May, encouraging three-child families after China’s fertility rate dropped to just 1.3 children per woman in 2020.