Top Down Impositions of Cultural Norms and China’s Demography

The policy was both cruel and a blunder. Family-planning officials assumed that birth rates would spring back once controls were abolished. Alas, they re-educated parents too well. One child became the norm, certainly in cities. Consider another figure that should haunt leaders: 1.7. That is the number of children that, on average, Chinese women of child-bearing age call ideal. China’s ideal is one of the world’s lowest, far below the number given in Japan or South Korea. Chinese women born after 1995 want the fewest of all: 48.3% of them told the Chinese General Social Survey of 2021 that they desire one or no children. There is growing evidence that such attitudes are powerfully shaped by how people, and those around them, experienced the one-child policy.

https://www.economist.com/china/2024/03/21/chinas-low-fertility-trap

“The policy” refers to , of course, the infamous one child policy. Please read the entire article (assuming you can, because The Economist articles are often behind a paywall) – it is an eye-opener in many ways.

But my primary takeaway is how difficult it becomes to change culture, once it has been imposed. The last sentence of that excerpt is the worrying one, and not just in the case of China and the one-child policy.

Attitudes are indeed shaped by how experiences one has while growing up. And in the case of China and her demographics, it looks as if attitudes about families and (the number of) children will not be changing in a hurry, if at all.

India is, at best, twenty years away from where China (and most, if not all, of East Asia) is today. All the more reason to worry about India’s growth rates over the next two decades – her current demographic dividend is not a gift that will keep giving forever.