Chinese women are flooding regime-controlled social media with complaints that local Communist Party officials are making phone calls to harass them into having more children, the South China Morning Post reported on Tuesday.
The callers, government “grassroots” officials, sometimes demand details of their private lives including the timing of their latest menstrual cycles.
Other Asian media outlets documented similar reports of a “grassroots” campaign to pressure women, including those already parenting multiple children, into contributing towards improving China’s dismal birth rate by becoming pregnant. The phone calls seem to be part of a larger program of “birth support policy measures” that Beijing rolled out on Monday, according to the state-run Global Times newspaper to facilitate childbirth.
None of the reports mention similar phone calls to men to encourage them to marry and have children with their partners, or pressuring them to pursue medical checks to ensure their ability to have children.
China has for years documented a dramatic decline in the number of babies born annually. In January, the Communist Party’s National Bureau of Statistics revealed that the birth rate fell to a record low in 2023, driving population decline and a significant increase in the number of elderly Chinese nationals. China reportedly lost 2.08 million in population in 2023 and the number of births declined by 5.7 percent compared to the year before. Driving the national disinterest in building families are a variety of factors caused by Communist Party policies, including the imposition of the brutal “one child policy” for decades that forced women to abort second children and led to a massive imbalance in the sex of babies born in the country. China is currently believed to be home to almost 35 million more men than women.
The lack of job prospects for many young Chinese, disillusion or outright rejection of communist ideology, and responsibilities in caring for their elderly parents have also contributed to many Chinese Millennials adopting a lifestyle known as “lying flat,” where they abandon familial, career, and other ambitions.
The fertility free fall has caused tremendous strain to the Chinese economy. In addition to creating a future situation of limited growth, the small population of children has left droves of teachers childless and threatened the ability of pediatricians and others in child-centered careers to maintain employment. State media has documented a trend of kindergarten teachers shutting down their facilities and refurbishing them for use as nursing homes.
The South China Morning Post detailed a comprehensive campaign to harass women into having children nationwide, describing the targets as “tens of thousands Chinese women of childbearing age,” bombarded by a “vigorous campaign organised by vast district administrative networks.”
One Chinese woman who spoke to the newspaper, the mother of a son, said a government worker called her and bluntly asked her if she was pregnant. Since she was not, the worker asked her for details about her menstrual cycle and offered to schedule a reminder call for when she would likely be ovulating.
The Morning Post noted that the same “grassroots” workers currently pestering women to have more children “spent decades imposing strict birth control policies,” a euphemism for the mass infanticide of the “one child policy.” The policy, which banned families from having more than one child from 1980 to 2016, “prevented” 400 million people from living, according to the Chinese government.
The Singapore-based Channel News Asia reported that posts from alleged women on the Chinese regime-controlled social media platform Xiaohongshu documenting similar intrusive calls began going viral in the past week. On Weibo, another highly censored Chinese social platform, the topic “Fertility Call Checks” reportedly trended recently, the outlet noted. The government appeared to allow some opening questioning of the wisdom of the harassment, as some users reportedly challenged the appropriateness of the measure.
The U.S.-based online outlet China Digital Times similarly documented this week various posts on Chinese media complaining about government harassment regarding pregnancy. The Times noted that civilians in China report the emergency of banners nationwide showing large families and actively encouraging childbirth, part of a larger propaganda program to improve the birth rate.
The leftist newspaper New York Times reported on the “fertility call checks” in early October, also noting the detail that Communist Party officials were asking women “the date of their last menstrual cycle.”
“Some people believe that marriage and childbirth are only private matters, and up to each individual. This view is wrong and one-sided,” the Times quoted a a government-run family planning association declaring in a propaganda post.
The Global Times announced “new birth policy support measures” on Monday, but did not list harassment calls among them. It did describe a government policy of “actively promoting a new culture of marriage and childbirth, strongly advocating positive views on marriage, parenthood, and family.”
The plan “also includes enhancing social awareness campaigns and strengthening education on national population conditions,” it continued – presumably referring to the collapse of the national birth rate – “and policies by integrating relevant content into primary and secondary schools, as well as undergraduate programs.”
Other measures including expanding maternity leave, access to health care and fertility treatments, and improving the Chinese education system for the resulting children.