by Roseann Lake
Because the Chinese government has relieved its ballistics specialists of population-control duty and is being informed on how to best reverse the one-child policy by social scientists, it also has a better grasp on the numbers and age structure of its population. Currently, 16 percent of the population is over age sixty, and that percentage is set to double by 2050. The majority of the country’s residents now live in urban areas—793 million, versus 590 million in rural areas—and there is a gender imbalance of 30 million more men than women of marriage age. To help recalibrate the country from both age and gender perspectives, the government has set a population target of 1.42 billion by 2020, which means that the population would need to grow by roughly 70 million over the next two years. If recent fertility rates are any indication, this goal is highly ambitious. In the first year since the one-child policy was replaced by a two-child policy, there was only an increase of 1.31 million childbirths over the previous year, which clearly indicates that Chinese families aren’t as keen to have as many children as their government would like them to.
The low fertility rate is the result of many factors, starting with the simple reality that it is very expensive to raise a child in China in accord with middle- to upper-class expectations. Parents with means have lavished their only children with private tutors and foreign educations; such expenses add up and are considered too high to double without significantly compromising on quality. China remains highly competitive and in order to maximize their children’s chances for success, many parents now believe they must not dilute the opportunities they are able to give to one child by having another.
“My mom became pregnant with a second child when I was three,” explained Cara, a Chinese friend of mine now living in New York City. Born in Shanghai in 1988, she was raised primarily by her grandparents, as her mother and father worked long hours and didn’t have time to care for a child. Her mother ended up aborting the second baby—a boy—because her family couldn’t afford to raise both children. “China was growing considerably at the time, and my parents wanted to use every opportunity they could to improve our living conditions.” Their hard work paid off, and Cara’s parents were able to fund a college degree for their daughter in the United States and now live comfortably among China’s upper middle class. “They are baofa hu,” she explains, part of the wave of Chinese “upstarts” who rose from humble origins to a position of wealth.
“My life would have been so different with a brother,” said Cara. “To have a sibling to play with as a child would have been nice, though it would have definitely impacted my lifestyle as an adult.” As uncomfortable as it may be to think about, she’s probably right. Cara’s parents paid for her to go to college in New York, where they bought her an apartment, and a luxury sports car to drive to and from Flushing, a predominantly Chinese neighborhood in Queens, where she likes to buy groceries, dine out, and get manicures.
While Cara works nine to five in New York, her now retired parents spend their days traveling. Their social media “moments” on WeChat show that they’ve visited Sweden, the Maldives, Hawaii, and the Egyptian pyramids in the span of less than ten months. They spend lavishly wherever they travel and once gifted Cara a souvenir pink diamond from Nepal that is certain to intimidate any man hoping to ask for her hand. (When a former suitor was taking too long to pop the question because he was still in grad school and couldn’t afford a ring, Cara’s mom—who is very eager to be a mother-in-law—cheerfully suggested that she just seal the deal with the pink diamond.)
At home in Shanghai, Cara’s mother busies herself with singing karaoke (she’s on a social media platform that allows others to rate her singing, and is apparently quite the sensation) while her dad busies himself with traditional ink-and-brush paintings. Although they enjoy their life as jet-setters—they often travel in gaggles with other jolly Chinese retirees—they are both very keen for their daughter to return to Shanghai, where they expect her to get married and give them not one, but two grandchildren.
“Since they were robbed of the chance to take care of me as a baby, they are especially eager to be grandparents,” explains Cara. “But because they know that the parents of my future husband will be equally keen to take care of a baby, they want one for themselves,” she explains. Sensing my confusion, she clarifies. “One baby should take my husband’s last name, and the other should have mine.”
Cara herself isn’t crazy about the idea of having any children, much less a designated grandchild for both her parents and her in-laws. She reassures me, however, that this is becoming a trend among more well-to-do families who have invested heavily in their daughters, and that it’s adding to the pressure on her to settle down.
“They want me to get started as soon as possible so that they can care for their grandchildren while they’re still healthy,” she said. “They have it all planned out—all I’m expected to do is give birth.”
Another one of my Chinese female friends in New York is facing similar, although slightly more intense, pressure to procreate. She’s already had one child (a boy), and while her in-laws are already encouraging her to have another, her dad has even more ambitious plans. “Anyone in China these days can have two,” he told her. “You live in the US now, you should have three!”
Double Trouble
From an employment perspective, the two-child policy has also made things more complicated for Chinese women. “Before, employers would discriminate against women who were not married or who did not have a child,” explains Lily, who works at a foreign firm with offices in Beijing. “Now,” she explains, “the discrimination has escalated.”
Lily got her current job in her twenties, and at the time she was applying, she didn’t realize that age and marital status would play so heavily into her future career prospects. “I thought a greater amount of work experience would give me better opportunities in the future, but I didn’t realize that my age and gender would eventually work against me.”
Now in her mid-thirties, Lily has been struggling to get a new job and believes she has been unsuccessful because she is not married. “I had no idea that this was a real concern for HR managers, but they take no pains to hide it,” she explains. “I recently applied for a position with a multinational company and was interviewed by a Taiwanese manager who very bluntly told me that if I were in my early twenties, she wouldn’t have bothered asking about my plans for marriage and motherhood, but now that I was in my early thirties, she was required to,” said Lily.
“This has happened to me on several occasions, and the craziest thing is that it’s usually women discriminating against other women,” she added.
Because most employers in China require that prospective employees list their age and marital status on their CV, HR managers know that Lily is single. She believes this contributes to “invisible discrimination” and once tried to leave this information off of her CV, but prospective employers called and asked her to include it before considering her for an interview.
In addition to fielding personal questions about her future plans, Lily is often offered employment under constricting circumstances. “Even after I openly stated that I had no plans to have children, one employer asked if I would be OK with signing a contract promising that I wouldn’t get pregnant for up to two years,” she said, mentioning that this was a common occurrence in her friends circle, among both single and married women.
As tempting as it may be to assume that this sort of discrimination only happens at local Chinese companies, Lily reassures me that these anecdotes are from her experiences applying to work for multinationals operating in China. “When it comes to their HR departments, most of the employees are Chinese, and so they follow more local rules,” she said. She adds that since the two-child policy, things have become slightly more complicated. Employers now fear that they might eventually have to pay for up to two rounds of maternity leave (amounting to about ninety-eight days) for currently childless women, and so they are ever more fearf
ul of employing women who have no kids but are at an age where they might.
At this rate, it’s difficult to imagine that the number of babies born in China will soar anytime soon. Chinese government figures rather optimistically predict that with the two-child policy, the total fertility rate will rise to 2.1 (22 million births per year) in 2018, then gradually decline to 1.72 in 2050. If this were to happen, China’s population would peak at 1.45 billion in 2029, then decline to 1.38 billion in 2050. However, Chinese demographer Yi Fuxian, a scientist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, projects a very different trajectory. Because the mere existence of a two-child policy doesn’t mean that Chinese women are suddenly all going to be having two babies—fertility cannot be switched on and off, contrary to what the Chinese government might like to believe—Fuxian predicts that the total fertility rate will temporarily rebound from 1.05 in 2015 to 1.3 in 2017, then decline even further. Ultimately, he estimates that China’s population will drop to 1.1 billion in 2050, and that by 2100, there will be 500 million Chinese people left in China—most of them elderly.
For China’s population to halve in the next sixty years is a very big deal. Much of what the country has achieved—socially and economically—has hinged on its power in numbers, and its youth. In 1980, the average age in China was twenty-two, explains Fuxian. That number rose to thirty-eight in 2015 and is predicted to increase to fifty-six by 2050, putting it among the oldest populations in the world. (By 2050, the average age in the United States will be forty-two and in India it will be a spry thirty-seven. The world average is expected to be around thirty-six.) And while China had 7.6 people of working age supporting every person over sixty-four in 2010, by 2050, Fuxian estimates that the number will decrease to a harrowing 1.7 supporting every senior. This is nearly the equivalent of each person taking care of their parents as they age—a heavy responsibility for a married couple with one or two children besides.
These estimates are based on current fertility rates, which don’t fully account for the rising percentage of Chinese women who are choosing to get married and have children later in life, or not at all. In the context of Eastern Asia, China’s numbers of unmarried women are still comparatively low, but it’s important to remember that China’s socioeconomic level is an average of twenty years behind that of its neighbors. In the 1980s, when China still had a near universal marriage rate for women by age thirty (there were few alternatives to marriage at the time), in Japan, Singapore, and South Korea, approximately 20 percent of women remained unmarried at age thirty. Today, the average percentage of unmarried women under thirty in Japan, South Korea, and Singapore has soared to 70 percent, and even by age thirty-nine, over 20 percent of women in those countries still remain unmarried. For added perspective, Hong Kong and Taiwan follow a similar pattern: an average of 68 percent of women under thirty are unmarried, and 19 percent remain so by age thirty-nine. In China, the percentage of unmarried women at age thirty-nine is still a modest 5 percent, though given everything Chinese women have achieved over the past thirty years, there is strong reason to believe that these numbers will increase.
In the United States, by contrast, the opposite has happened. As mentioned earlier, college-educated women are now more likely to marry than their lesser-educated counterparts, and in addition, American women as a whole have taken on a greater share of breadwinning responsibilities. According to the US Center for American Progress, 42 percent of mothers are the sole or primary earners in US households.* Biological anthropologist Helen Fisher believes this represents an exciting return to our “hunting-and-gathering past,” in which women would forage and usually came home with 60 to 80 percent of what their families ate. Their ability to consistently provide for their families—it wasn’t every day that their husbands would manage to hunt down and slaughter a boar—made them as economically and sexually powerful as men. They could leave bad relationships if they wanted to because they weren’t financially dependent on their partners—until the tractor was invented and put them out of commission.
Jisoo Hwang, the Korean researcher mentioned earlier, posits that because GDP growth has been more gradual in the United States, and because women have entered the workforce and seen an increase in their wages over a longer period of time, they’ve avoided the “shock” that results when economies grow quickly and female workforce participation rates and salaries increase suddenly. Hwang argues that this “shock” often results in high rates of single women as men struggle to adapt to a new role for women so different from the one they grew up with. There is a risk that the same might happen in China, where the same economic growth pattern readily applies—but I don’t think it will.
Making an educated guess, I’d venture that the biggest challenge Chinese men and women will face in terms of partnering off will be an increasingly larger supply of college-graduate women and a shrinking pool of college-graduate men. This situation is nothing new—it’s true in virtually all developed countries in the world, including in the United States, where Jon Birger explains in Date-onomics (a fascinating read) that young American millennial women are entering a dating pool of 134 college-educated women for every 100 college-educated men. For perspective, he notes that today’s forty-year-old college-educated woman started out with a dating pool of 117 college-educated women for every 100 men, which wasn’t ideal either, but certainly preferable to the current situation. Although the gender imbalance on US college campuses shows signs of becoming even more acute, it has existed for at least three decades, and marriage patterns have started to adjust accordingly. It is not uncommon for women in the United States (or in most of the developed world, as mentioned earlier) to marry men with less education than themselves. In China, that’s still a hard pill to swallow; men remain more hesitant to marry up, and women less likely to marry down, with parents usually reinforcing this reluctance. Mathematically, if this does not change, it will add to a decrease in marriage rates over time and could bring China up to the numbers seen in the East Asian countries examined earlier.
While this may make it even more tempting to draw parallels between China and its neighbors—at this point, China is probably just a rap song away from begging its population to reproduce—it’s important to underscore certain differences that have the potential to send China down an alternate path.
After years of economic growth driven by higher manufacturing and rural-to-urban migration, China is at an important crossroads. In order to sustain its economy, it must increase consumer spending and shift its focus away from heavy industry and exports, in favor of services and consumer products. On many levels, it is well placed to make this transition. Just ten years ago, 1 in 20 college-age people in China pursued higher education; now it’s 1 in 3. While we in the United States still swipe credit cards, fiddle with coins, and sign receipts, China has become a cashless, paperless society. Almost anything can be purchased with the scan of a barcode, from street-side dumplings to sports cars. You can book a car, a massage, or a vacation all from the same app, and pay for it with funds that may earn more interest from being in a Web bank account than they would in an actual bank. WeChat is the world’s most versatile social media platform and Alibaba is the world’s largest e-commerce platform; both are Chinese and neither show any signs of disappearing anytime soon.
In addition to this futuristic digital edge, China—unlike its East Asian tiger economy counterparts—has a huge, growing class of professional women who are engaged in the formal workforce. Already, they contribute to 41 percent of Chinese GDP, which is one of the highest rates in the world. Forcing them to conform to an antiquated timeline for marriage and motherhood or failing to acknowledge the critical role they play in Chinese society—aside from ensuring it doesn’t go extinct—would risk undoing all of the progress that China has made over the last thirty years.
Yet beyond its domestic potential to blaze a brighter path for itself, China is also favorably placed to set the tone for many other countries across the world,
namely because no other country straddles the developed and the developing world as China does at this precise moment in time. Home to one-quarter of the world’s female population, it is the pitch-perfect composition of a prodigious change that has already worked its way around most parts of the developed world. How China makes room for women whose careers, educations, and lifestyles may make them more likely to marry and have children later in life, or not at all, will have an effect on legions of women to come.
When you add India to the equation, the scope for change nearly doubles. India’s female population is almost as large as China’s. It is a country that also suffers from a severe gender imbalance, and although from a socioeconomic perspective, it is light-years behind China, there are areas where the two countries intersect. According to research from the McKinsey Global Institute (MGI), there is a wide variation in gender equality among India’s thirty-two states, largely because of disparities in work opportunities. The top five states closest to gender parity are on par with China, Argentina, and Indonesia; India’s bottom five states on gender parity are more in line with Chad and Yemen. In other words, there is a strong correlation between a woman’s perceived value in the workforce and her value in society; without both those things being valued, neither one is possible.
If 68 million Indian women could be brought into the non-farm labor force over the next decade, MGI estimates indicate that the country could boost its GDP by $0.7 trillion by 2025. The process for bringing them into the workforce involves doing things that China has already done well: closing gender gaps in secondary and tertiary education, expanding the reach of financial and digital services to enable women entrepreneurs, and challenging entrenched attitudes regarding the role of women in work and society. At present, women in India contribute the lowest share of GDP among all regions in the world, putting it on par with the Middle East and North Africa, where in many places, female employment is restricted by law. The economic growth potential from advancing gender equality and improving female workforce participation in India is the highest in the world.