China’s National Health Commission (NHC) told Reuters this week that ongoing Chinese coronavirus lockdowns nationwide have had a “clear impact on the marriage and childbirth arrangements of some people” within the country and have contributed to the nation’s plummeting fertility rate and shrinking population, the news agency reported Tuesday.
“COVID-19 [Chinese coronavirus] has contributed to the decline in the country’s marriage and birth rates that has accelerated in recent years due to the high costs of education and child-rearing,” the NHC told Reuters in faxed statements on August 22.
“The coronavirus has also had a clear impact on the marriage and childbirth arrangements of some people,” the commission added.
Reuters on August 8 cited a U.N. China report which found that Beijing’s relentless zero-tolerance policy toward the Chinese coronavirus throughout the pandemic, including stringent lockdowns and forced quarantines, had effected “a long-term impact on first births [in China].”
This photo taken on April 5, 2022 shows people wearing personal protective equipment (PPE) as they transfer daily food supplies and necessities for local residents during the Covid-19 lockdown in Shanghai. (STR/AFP via Getty Images)
The report said Chinese women cited “financial insecurity, […] worries about COVID [Chinese coronavirus] vaccines affecting foetuses, along with difficulties in carrying a pregnancy and taking care of an infant under heavy restrictions” as reasons for putting off plans to have children during the pandemic.
A worker wearing protective gear (L) receives an item from a delivery worker at the entrance of a compound during the second stage of a pandemic lockdown in Jing’ an district in Shanghai on April 5, 2022. (HECTOR RETAMAL/AFP via Getty Images)
“Couples that may have been thinking about having a child in the next year, definitely postponed those. Couples that really weren’t sure, have postponed indefinitely,” U.N. Population Fund Representative to China Justine Coulson said as quoted by Reuters on August 8.
A girl looks from a window in a residential area on April 12, 2022 in Shanghai, China, during a strict lockdown after a surge in Omicron cases. (Getty Images)
China’s population is on track to shrink by 2025 following decades of a one-child policy that encouraged abortions and severely warped the nation’s demographics. The Chinese Communist Party initiated its one-child policy in 1980 in response to the country’s explosive population growth in the 1970s. Beijing relaxed the limit to two children in 2015 and again expanded it to allow couples to have up to three children in 2016 after realizing that China’s fertility rate was dangerously low.
China’s birth rate for 2021, or the number of live births per thousand of a population annually, was 7.52. The figure marked China’s lowest birth rate on record since Beijing began collating relevant data in 1949.
“China had a fertility rate of 1.16 in 2021, one of the lowest rates in the world and below the 2.1 rate the OECD sees as necessary for a stable population,” Reuters recalled on Tuesday.
A fertility rate is the “total number of children that would be born to each woman if she were to live to the end of her child-bearing years,” according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).
The Chinese Communist Party’s zero-tolerance policy toward the Chinese coronavirus has remained in force since early 2020. The seemingly obsolete approach has persisted in China despite most of the world evolving to live with the virus roughly two and a half years after the World Health Organization (W.H.O.) first declared a pandemic due to the disease on March 11, 2020. The Chinese coronavirus first emerged in central China’s Wuhan city sometime in the fall or winter of 2019 under unclear circumstances.
The Chinese Communist Party ordered Wuhan to observe the world’s first Chinese coronavirus lockdown on January 23, 2020. The edict lasted for 76 consecutive days through April 8, 2020. China’s lockdown policy remained in full force on March 28 when it ordered Shanghai’s entire populace of 25 million-plus residents to obey a 65-day stay-at-home edict after detecting a Chinese coronavirus cluster infection in the coastal metropolis. While Shanghai’s spring lockdown officially lasted through June 1, additional lockdown edicts issued immediately after the date forced some of the city’s residents to remain confined to their homes in subsequent days and months. Various forms of movement restrictions have since been reinforced throughout Shanghai over the past three months in response to fresh Chinese coronavirus outbreaks.