The Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), the advisory body that meets once a year in concert with the National People’s Congress (NPC) for the policymaking “Two Sessions” this week, is considering proposals that might turn around China’s accelerating demographic decline.
One of the proposals would extend full legal status and fertility service to unmarried women. Under current Chinese national law, only married women can legally give birth, register children, and access fertility services.
Unmarried mothers have long been denied access to maternity benefits, in part because Chinese family planning policies are written with the assumption that all mothers are married. Doing otherwise was long seen as faintly scandalous, an official government endorsement of immoral behavior.
For example, until 2021, only Guangdong province adjacent to Hong Kong permitted unmarried women to apply for maternity influence, and such applications are still not widely entertained. In February of this year, Sichuan became the first province to allow full legal recognition and benefits for unmarried parents. Jilin province tried to grant single women access to in vitro fertilization in 2002, but it was overridden by national laws.
Most provinces still have laws that effectively penalize single motherhood. China also generally restricts maternity rights for gays and lesbians, as it does not recognize same-sex marriage.
Few observers have any illusions about why these policies are slowly beginning to change: the Chinese government is panicking as fertility rates crater and the population begins to decline. Sichuan’s pilot program to legalize single parenthood was explicitly presented by provincial health authorities as an effort to “promote long-term and balanced population development.”
China has much the same problem as most other advanced nations, as young women choose to delay marriage and child-rearing to focus on building their fortunes and developing their careers – but it comes on the heels of decades of brutal “One Child Policy” population controls that left the current generation woefully short of fertile young women.
The One Child Policy was expanded to two children per family in 2015 by order of dictator Xi Jinping and expanded again to not only permit but encourage larger families in 2021. The Chinese public is not responding with the desired fertility rates, however, leading to more and more extreme government propositions. In fact, some Chinese were outspokenly angry that the government would essentially order them to start having children after long years of harshly punishing them for doing so.
The CPPCC will also consider policy incentives to subsidize children, including tax benefits, extended maternity leave, and free college education for a third child. The latter proposal from CPPCC delegate Gan Huatian, a professor at West China Hospital, immediately became a trending topic on Chinese social media on Thursday
“Education expense is the most important obstacle to promote giving birth. Free education for the third child is a good choice and the financial department can afford this expenditure,” Gan contended.
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