Hong Kong
—
Zane Li was nine years old when he got a baby sister – and her arrival plunged the family in a small city in eastern China into crippling debt.
Under China’s stringent one-child policy at the time, Li’s parents were fined 100,000 yuan (about $13,900) for having a second child – nearly three times their annual income from selling fish at the local market.
“We were barely able to survive,” Li recalled. The then third grader was forced to grow up overnight, taking on most of the housework and spending school holidays helping his mother at her stall.
Now 25, Li says he has no plans to have children – a stance increasingly common for his generation and something that worries China’s government as it tries to avert a population crisis of its own making.
For decades, officials pressured couples to have fewer children through hefty fines, forced abortions and sterilizations, only to now plead with Li’s generation to make more babies.
Last week, in the latest push to boost flagging birth rates, China announced it would offer parents an annual subsidy of 3,600 yuan ($500) for every child until age three, effective retroactively from January 1.
But for many young adults like Li, the offer falls flat.
“The cost of raising a child is enormous, and 3,600 yuan a year is a mere drop in the bucket,” said Li, who took out a student loan to study for a master’s degree in health services in Beijing.
Raising a child to the age of 18 costs an average of 538,000 yuan ($75,000) in China, more than 6 times its GDP per capita – making it one of the most expensive places in the world to have children in relative terms, according to a recent study by the Beijing-based YuWa Population Research Institute.
In Shanghai, the cost soars past 1 million yuan, with Beijing close behind at 936,000 yuan.
“(Having kids) would only bring more hardship. I’m not a capitalist or anything, and my kid probably wouldn’t have much of a good life either,” said Li, who’s anxious about his job prospects and contemplating pursuing a PhD.
Such a dim outlook on future parenthood – fueled by China’s slowing economy and soaring youth unemployment – presents a major hurdle to the government’s push for young people to get married and have children.
Faced with a shrinking workforce and a rapidly aging population, China scrapped its one-child policy in 2016, allowing couples to have two children, then three in 2021. But birth rates have continued to slide. The population has now been shrinking for three consecutive years despite a modest rebound in births last year, and experts are now warning of an even sharper decline.
The newly announced national childcare subsidy marks a significant step in China’s pro-birth campaign.
For years, local authorities have experimented with a raft of incentives – from tax breaks, housing perks and cash handouts to extended maternity leaves. Now, the central government is taking the lead with a standardized, nationwide program, allocating 90 billion yuan ($12.54 billion) in subsidies expected to benefit 20 million families this year.
“It’s no longer just a local experiment. It’s a signal that the government sees the birth rate crisis as urgent and national,” said Emma Zang, a demographer and sociology professor at Yale University. “The message is clear: we’re not just telling you to have babies, we are finally putting some money on the table.”
The new scheme, which also offers partial subsidies for children under three born prior to 2025, has been welcomed by eligible parents but Zang said it’s unlikely to move the needle on fertility rate. Similar policies have largely failed to boost births in other East Asian societies like Japan and South Korea, she added.
For many Chinese young people grappling with unattainable housing prices, long workdays and a precarious job market, the subsidy doesn’t even begin to address the deep-seated anxieties that underpin their reluctance to start a family.
“It’s really not just about the cost. Many young adults are skeptical about the future, such as job security, aging parents, social pressure, so a cash handout doesn’t address the emotional fatigue people are facing these days,” Zang said.
The irony of the shift from fining parents for unsanctioned births to subsidizing them to have more children is not lost on China’s millennials and Gen Zs – especially those who have witnessed the harsh penalties of the one-child policy firsthand.
On Chinese social media, some users have posted photos of old receipts showing the fines their parents once paid for giving birth to them or their siblings.
Among them is Gao, who grew up in the remote mountains of Guizhou and asked to only be identified by her family name. The southwestern province is one of China’s poorest and was among the many areas granted a carve-out under the one-child policy, allowing rural couples a second child if their first born was a girl – a concession to the country’s traditional preference for sons.
Like her two older sisters, Gao was sent to live with her grandmother shortly after she was born to hide from family planning officials, so that her parents could keep trying for a boy. They went on to have four daughters before finally having a son.
Now living in the eastern province of Jiangsu, Gao, 27, says she has no interest in marriage or raising children.
“Knowing that I can’t provide a child with a good environment for education and life, choosing not to have one is also an act of kindness,” she said. “I definitely don’t want my child to grow up like me … with no chance of upward mobility and struggling at the bottom of society, just as I have.”
For decades, as China’s economy boomed and living standards improved, generations of young people had grown up with the belief that they would live a better life than their parents.
That optimism is now fading.
Today, many youngsters raised on the promise of upward mobility through hard work and education are growing disillusioned: property prices have soared beyond their reach, and a university degree no longer guarantees a good job – with coveted opportunities increasingly going to those with family connections.
There is a growing sense of futility that their relentless effort yields only diminishing returns in an ever more competitive society – a trend summed up by the popular buzzword “involution,” a term borrowed from sociology to describe a self-defeating spiral of excessive competition.
In response, many are choosing to “lie flat” – another catchphrase that refers to opting out of the grind of meeting society’s expectations, including marriage and childrearing.
June Zhao, 29, grew up in a middle-class family in one of the most “involuted” places in China: Beijing’s Haidian district.
Home to 3 million people and many of the nation’s top universities, Haidian is equally famous for its hyper-competitive approach to raising children. Zhao started attending tutoring classes every weekend in third grade – and she was already a few years behind her peers.
After finishing her bachelor and postgraduate degrees overseas, Zhao returned to Beijing to work in investor relations. She says the immense pressure she grew up with – and still feels – has played a big part in her decision not to have children.
“The cost is simply too high and the returns too low,” she said. “In general, I have a rather pessimistic outlook on life – I’ve put in so much, yet received very little in return.”
Zhao considers herself lucky – her job rarely demands much overtime. Even so, she struggles to imagine finding the time to raise a child. After commuting and eating dinner, she has just two or three hours of free time each day before going to bed. It would be even harder for her friends trapped in the “996” grind of working from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week, she said.
Like many of her contemporaries, Gao simply is not optimistic about the life she could provide for a child, or the society it would be born into. “You only feel the urge to have children when you believe the days to come will be good,” she said.
Then there’s the longstanding gender imbalance in childrearing, along with the physical and emotional toll it takes on women. In Zhao’s case, it was her mother who had to juggle having a full-time job and helping her with homework, or escorting her to tutoring classes.
“I saw firsthand how hard it was for my mother to raise me. I know for a fact that women bear a much heavier burden and cost than men when it comes to raising a family,” she said.
As the fertility rate drops, the ruling Communist Party has emphasized women’s domestic role as a “virtuous wife and good mother” – touting it as a cherished part of China’s traditional culture and essential to the “healthy growth of the next generation.” Officials have exhorted women to establish a “correct outlook on marriage, childbirth and family.”
Zang, the demographer, said it’s simply unrealistic to expect women to have more children without addressing the real barriers they face.
“You can’t turn back the clock and hope that women will just embrace more traditional roles. Today’s young women are highly educated, career oriented, and want more equality. Unless policies support that reality through things like paternity leave, workplace protection and flexible jobs, fertility rates won’t rebound,” she said.
“The government wants more babies, but society isn’t structured to support families,” she added. “Right now, parenting looks like a trap, especially for women. Until that changes, subsidies won’t be enough.”
