[LINK] "China's Missing Babies"

[rfmcdonald]

Bloomberg View's Adam Minter points out that Chinese fertility is not going to pick up with the revision or even abolition of the one-child policy. Chinese parents, just like parents in other developed societies, are reluctant to have many children.

In one of the signature reform measures of his early presidency, Xi Jinping declared last November that China’s notorious “one-child” policy would become a “two-child” policy for couples where either husband or wife was an only child. While the change didn’t abolish the often brutally enforced population control measure, it was a start. Chinese officials hoped the announcement would usher in a mini-baby boom, predicting as many as 2 million additional births per year to parents who had long been denied full reproductive rights.

Xi’s government, of course, wasn’t merely expressing its love of children. The point was to find a quick fix -- let them have more kids! -- to a looming demographic disaster: By 2050, one in four Chinese will be 65 or older, placing intense pressure on families, social services, and the economy. Yet what’s fast becoming clear is that there’s no easy solution to China’s population problems.

The proof is in data released on Wednesday by China’s National Health and Family Planning Commission. Of the more than 11 million Chinese couples that became eligible to have a second child, only 700,000 have applied to do so. (Around 620,000 were approved.) No national-level data was provided as to how many children have been born to those couples. But the city of Chongqing, whose population of more than 33 million is sometimes called the world’s largest, was disappointed to claim a mere 5,015 births as a result of the reform.

Why aren’t Chinese parents embracing the chance to have more kids? The biggest problem is one familiar to parents worldwide: It’s expensive to raise children in China, and only becoming more so. While hard data on this point is lacking, the anecdotal evidence is persuasive -- and is embraced by Chinese government organizations and state media. A December 2013 report from the state-run All-China Women’s Federation, for instance, claimed that urban Chinese families earning between RMB 4,000 and RMB 10,000 per month were, on average, spending RMB 3,000 per month on their kids. The rising costs are driven by a number of factors, especially expensive school fees.