Xi Jinping blames women for population decline, but the reasons are many

To boost the birth rate, the Chinese president and the Communist Party are looking to women. The reasons for the plummeting birth rate are attributable to the one-child policy, the economic crisis China is going through, and a cultural change among the younger generations.

Beijing (AsiaNews) - "It is necessary to guide women to play their role in carrying forward the traditional virtues of the Chinese nation", said President Xi Jinping during a meeting of the All China's Women Federation (Acwf), underlining how to carry out a good work, in the case of women, is not only linked to their personal development, but also to family and social harmony, as well as to national development and progress.

Xi's choice of words at the ACWF meeting is not accidental. The purpose of the organization, founded in 1949 and under the direct control of the Chinese Communist Party, is to represent and safeguard women's rights and interests, promote gender equality, all-round women's development, but also , as stated on their website, guide women in learning the vision of Xi Jinping and the Party's policies, which assigns women a central role in the fight against demographic collapse.

In 2022, for the first time in 60 years, China recorded a decline in its total population from 1 billion 412 million in 2021 to 1 billion 411. The decline was mainly due to the increase in life expectancy combined with dizzying collapse in fertility. In the country we went from having 3.2 children per woman in 1976 to 1.7 in 2015.

However, the collapse in fertility is only one of the factors caused by the one-child policy which today constitute a problem for Chinese demography. The policy has in fact brought another unwanted consequence by the current party leadership: census data released in May 2020 revealed that China today has a serious gender imbalance in which men outnumber women by approximately 34.9 million of individuals.

Today, for Xi Jinping, birth rate policies constitute one of the top priorities of the five-year plan 2021-2025. The country revoked the one-child policy 8 years ago. However, China's fertility rate continues to decline - from 1.7 in 2015 to 1.2 children in 2021.

The government has announced a new demographic policy that will allow families to have up to 3 children, a policy which, however, has yet to prove its effectiveness and which clashes with new difficulties in creating a family linked to the economic crisis and the change of mentality among the younger generations which lead especially women to have priorities that diverge from the creation of a family.

According to a study conducted by the YuWa Population Research Institute, raising a child in China is currently more expensive than in the United States or Japan. The study says that in 2019, the estimated expense of raising a child to age 18 in China was about 485,218 yuan (about ,700), or 6.9 times China's GDP per capita that year.

The cost increases even more if maintenance costs must also cover university studies. Chinese parents are facing rising costs related to education, healthcare and housing.

Furthermore, in China, women's career and education levels are rapidly increasing, and among adults aged 20 to 34, 52.7% of those have a bachelor's degree, according to the 2021 China Statistical Yearbook. or a higher title is female. Chinese women are looking at careers and education and actively choosing life paths that do not include marriage and children.