In the first week of September, China announced the latest in a series of measures to try to curb its population decline: it will no longer allow the adoption of Chinese children by citizens of other countries.
The program, created in 1992, has allowed foreign families to adopt more than 160,000 Chinese children, of which just over half were taken in by US citizens, according to a report by Reuters, citing data from China’s Children International (CCI), an international organization focused on Chinese adoptees.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning said the Beijing dictatorship’s goal was to be “in line” with international trends. The only exceptions would be cases of adoption by foreign blood relatives within three generations.
“We express our gratitude to foreign governments and families who wish to adopt Chinese children, for their good intentions and the love and kindness they have shown,” Mao said in announcing the move, which comes at a time of serious demographic crisis in the (now) second most populous country in the world.
In 2022, China lost population for the first time since 1961, when the population fell due to the Great Famine during Mao Zedong’s dictatorship. Last year, there was a further drop of 2.75 million inhabitants, more than double the previous year, when the negative balance had been 850,000.
With birth rates already low, in 2015 the communist dictatorship changed the one-child policy – which since 1979 had stipulated forced sterilizations and abortions and fines and other punishments for couples who had more than one child – and began to allow two children per couple.
In May 2021, it authorized three children per couple, and two months later it removed the punishments for those who do not respect the rule, in practice, freeing families to have as many children as they want.
Still, birth rates have continued to fall, which led the Chinese government to adopt a number of measures before banning foreign adoption, including state-run dating apps and subsidies for couples to have more children. So far, these measures have not had the desired effect on the Chinese regime.
The high cost of living and concerns about professional careers are among the reasons why young couples postpone or even give up on having children.
“My husband and I want to have a child, but we can’t afford it now,” Wang Chengyi, a 31-year-old woman from Beijing, told BBC News.
“I want to get pregnant while I’m young because it’s better for my health. However, I just don’t have enough money right now, so I have to postpone it. It’s a shame and sometimes it makes me panic,” she said.
One-child policy, even abolished, influences birth rates in China
Falling birth rates are a cause for concern, because the reduction in the percentage of young people generates uncertainty about the replacement of labor and the costs of maintaining the elderly (both in terms of social security and health systems).
China is not alone in this challenge, as neighbors such as Japan and South Korea are also facing sharp declines in this indicator.
But decades of one-child policies seem to add to the reality of China. In an article published in late 2021, Helen Gao, a Chinese analyst for the American magazine Foreign Policy, said that the policy “has left a lasting impression on family life” in the country and continues to influence birth rates.
She pointed out that China has millions of adults who grew up as only children and “cannot find any other role model to serve as a guide”: raised as “little emperors”, with full attention and without having to share anything with anyone, they seek to have at most one child so that he or she can have “what the parents had”, which becomes more difficult if there is more than one child in the family – even more so with the rising cost of living. In many cases, the option is not to have any children at all.
Gao also highlighted the imbalance caused by the preference for sons while the policy was in effect, which led to a much higher number of abortions of girls. As a result, China now has 30 million more men of “marriageable age” than women, according to government estimates, she said.
“The Chinese Communist Party once hailed the one-child policy as a great political planning achievement that helped alleviate global overpopulation. Now, it is suffering from its internal consequences,” Gao wrote.
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