Ten years after it ended its ‘one-child’ policy, China’s push for more babies isn’t winning its citizens over

By Simone McCarthy, Rosa de Acosta, Joyce Jiang, CNN

Beijing (CNN) — Welkin Lei has been doing some paper-napkin calculations in his spare time.

As the 30-year-old from Beijing and his wife consider whether to have a second child, they face a question of resources. Caring for their three-year-old son requires hiring childcare while they’re at work, and the couple – both only children – are also looking ahead to when they’ll need to balance parenting with the cost and time of caring for their own aging parents.

While those considerations are not uncommon around the world, they’re also uniquely at the heart of one of the biggest long-term domestic challenges facing China’s leaders: spurring the country’s young people to have more children after decades of stringent, state-enforced birth control that skewed its demographics.

And Lei believes more could to be done, specifically when it comes to the government offering more financial support to families. “If we want to encourage people to have more kids now, we need to put in the same, if not more, effort and commitment to make it happen,” he said.

January 1 marks 10 years since China scrapped its notorious “one-child” policy, after the government realized that a falling birth rate threatened to derail the growth of the world’s second-largest economy.

But the landmark change – and a raft of other measures to encourage couples to have more kids – have failed to boost the population.

China’s headcount shrank in the three years to 2024. A slight uptick in births that year was still not enough to outpace the number of deaths, and is not expected to be a lasting trend.

Over-60s now account for more than 20% of the population of 1.4 billion people and could make up a staggering half the population by 2100, according to United Nations projections – a reality with potentially far-reaching implications, not only for China’s economy but also its ambitions to rival the United States as a military power.

Chinese leader Xi Jinping has evoked the need for “population security” and made the “development of a high-quality population” a national priority. Analysts expect more policies or incentives to support births and marriage in the year ahead.

But many in China say boosting birth rates means addressing core issues like high youth unemployment, the high cost of raising children, and what’s seen as an unfair burden of child-raising on women.

And then there’s the direct legacy of the “one-child” policy, which left China with a gender imbalance and a generation of siblingless children now solely responsible for caring for elderly parents in a country where the social safety net remains weak in many places.

That’s why Lei said that – despite a stable job at a financial firm – he’s deeply concerned about the future.

“I know that no matter how much I save for the future, I have to buy the labor of someone else’s children to support (my parents) in their old age,” he said. “Given how society is developing, I doubt I’ll be able to afford that in the future.”

‘A drop in the bucket’

For decades, Beijing quashed “excess” births with a vast and ruthless government apparatus that monitored citizens and pressured them to have fewer children, including by using a deluge of propaganda, harassment and heavy fines, as well as forced abortions and sterilizations.

The goal of the “one-child” policy, officially enacted in 1980, was to rein in China’s runaway population growth, which officials at the time feared could imperil any hope of lifting the country out of poverty.

Now, authorities fear China will get old before it gets rich – a set of circumstances that distinguish it from other nations with aging populations like Japan and South Korea, which face deepening demographic challenges with more developed economies than China’s.

In a head-spinning shift, Chinese officials have launched the country into a pro-natalist direction, with marriage and birth – for heterosexual couples – promoted as key to the nation’s future. To make that tone shift clear, the country as of January 1 began charging value-added tax on condoms and other contraceptives.

Local authorities have in recent years experimented with a raft of incentives – from tax breaks, financial assistance for buying and renting homes and cash handouts to extended maternity leave. On social media, women have also reported receiving phone calls from community workers asking about their plans to have children – raising concern policies could take a coercive turn.

More recently, China’s central government has been taking the lead. Over the past year it has rolled out 3,600 yuan (roughly $500) annual cash bonuses to families with children under age three, amended rules to streamline marriage registration and kicked off a scheme for free public preschool.

Beijing already announced that it aims to eliminate out-of-pocket costs for hospital deliveries in 2026 and last month released a draft law to better regulate childcare services.

But many feel the perks so far barely put a dent in the actual costs of raising children in China, which a 2024 study from the Beijing-based YuWa Population Research Institute found was one of the most expensive places in the world to raise a child, in relative terms.

“The cost of raising kids in large urban areas is just too high and the subsidies feel like a drop in the bucket,” 34-year-old Mi Ya, who is raising her nine-year-old son in the financial hub Shanghai, told CNN.

“They don’t spark the desire to have a baby.”

Meanwhile, according to Mi, who used a pseudonym to speak with CNN about a sensitive issue, the “one-child” policy has shifted a generation’s perspective.

“People have now realized that having one child can also be an acceptable lifestyle and family structure,” she said.

‘How can you dare to have kids?’

And for many of China’s young people, coming into adulthood during and after the Covid-19 pandemic, policy measures to promote births are beside the point as they struggle for their own livelihoods.

Youth unemployment has remained persistently high in recent years as record numbers of college graduates struggle to find jobs in a slowing economy that’s also been hit by a raft of government crackdowns on private industries.

Zhou, a 27-year-old engineer, told CNN he would love to find a partner and start a family, but despite being employed he still relies on his parents to make ends meet in Hefei, a provincial capital in eastern China.

“The economy is so bleak right now – people need to be able to earn money first. If you can’t make money, how can you dare to have kids?” said Zhou, who chose to be identified by only his surname to voice his concerns. “The government needs to find ways to address these economic woes.”

China’s low marriage rate is also an obstacle to increasing births. And many young women see that as a good thing – as they choose to focus on their careers and reject entrenched gender norms that can leave women not only working full time but managing their children’s education in China’s highly competitive system.

“I don’t want to just live my life for the sake of having kids – I want to live for myself,” one 24-year-old master’s student surnamed Liu told CNN.

Disenchantment with the future – and an accompanying unwillingness to have kids – have at points become a rallying cry for people in China, in particular during the pandemic when the government mobilized stringent measures to stop the spread of the virus.

Then, “We are the last generation” became a viral slogan after a Shanghai resident used the phrase in a video-recorded argument with police enforcing the city’s isolation measures.

‘Irreversible drop’

China’s deepening demographic challenges are the result of a constellation of factors. The demographic scar of the “one-child” policy exacerbates trends also seen in other countries that have grappled with declining birth rates, linked to rising education levels, changing views on marriage, rapid urbanization, and higher costs of raising kids.

In China, the rapid demographic shift puts at risk Beijing’s long-term goals of boosting domestic consumption, reducing heavy debt and maintaining its role as a global manufacturing powerhouse.

Yanzhong Huang, a senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations, said the economic impact of the country’s shrinking workforce and consumer base and the coming cost of caring for a ballooning elderly population would be “profound.”

So far, policies to boost births have been “performative at best,” and not addressed the fundamental issues of high childrearing costs and a weak social security net, he added.

Beijing has taken steps to reform its pension system, including gradually raising the retirement age. Under Xi, the country is also racing toward another solution for its declining workforce: outsourcing human labor to robots by automating its factories.

Such steps may help its economy weather the demographic impact. But when it comes to substantively boosting birth rates or returning to the days of double-digit millions of new babies annually, experts remain skeptical that’s possible – even if policy measures do eventually have some impact mitigating the decline.

“If we changed the ‘one-child’ policy 20 years ago, it would be much better. Now it’s too late,” said Yao Yang, dean of the Di-shui-hu Advanced Finance Institute at the Shanghai University of Finance and Economics. And while there may be fluctuations and stability in the years to come with more policy support, over the long term and for a range of reasons, “the drop in birth rate is irreversible,” he said.

For many who lived under the policy, such consideration gives a sense of what might have been.

“Back in my generation… very few people around considered having a second child,” said Song Min, 57, from Beijing.

Decades later, Song, a mother of one, reflected that she would have made different choices, had she been free to do so.

“I feel that the ‘one-child’ policy very much confined my thinking at the time. But looking back, I realize I actually would have loved to have multiple children, not even just two.”

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