Chinese couples reluctant to have 3 kids despite shift from 'One Child Policy': Survey

Chinese couples are reluctant to have three children even after Beijing scrapped the One Child Policy nearly one-and-a-half years ago and introduced the three-child policy to boost the country's declining fertility rate, according to a new survey. Only about 9 per cent of Chinese couples say that they may want to have three children or more in Guangzhou city of southern China, despite the cost of living in those areas being affordable, the Guangdong Academy of Population Development Survey conducted in November and December last year, revealed. 

Economic and financial burden of child-rearing

More than 80 per cent of the 23,323 respondents, most of whom were Chinese couples, said that they expect to have only one kid, while some wanted to have just two. When asked what deters them from having more kids, the Chinese citizens attributed it to the reluctance to the economic and financial burden of child-rearing, lack of time and energy, work pressure, and housing and living conditions as the main obstacles, the study claimed. 

“The willingness to have two children is very common in China, same as many other countries such as Japan and South Korea, but this is an ideal circumstance, most of the people cannot realistically afford or achieve,”  Jiang Quanbao, a demography professor at Xian Jiaotong University was quoted as saying. 

“Especially now, it’s very likely that the number of births in China will further decrease this year.”

Chinese President Xi Jinping’s Chinese Communist Party [CPC] has been struggling to tackle the critically lower birth rates within the country due to the communist regime’s controversial one-child policy that has been seen having lingering effects on the Chinese population.

Only 10.62 million babies were born in Beijing in 2021, significantly lower than the 12.02 million in 2020, the National Bureau of Statistics showed. 

China has been recording the lowest-ever birth rate in its history as the population aged twenties and early thirties are now reluctant to enter parenthood. China also undercounted the number of children born between 2000 to 2010 by at least 11.6 million as Chinese couples remained reluctant to register births to avoid repercussions of violating the one-child policy.

However, now, the mid-aged population has been refraining from starting a family. Chinese nationals in their mid-twenties and thirties' has been termed 'tangping’ers,' the term implying “to lay flat" -- dedicated to doing just enough to get by in life.