Chinese authorities have allowed families to have a third child. Formally, the inhabitants of the Middle Kingdom could do this before, but only if they paid the state a large sum. As a result, the country is faced with the problem of total aging of the population. АиФ.ги I learned how modern China treats family planning.
“The decision of the Chinese Communist Party is related to the systematic decline in the number of newborns and the aging of the population in China over the past few years,” believes Lydia Stanchenko, Sinologist, journalist. The National Bureau of Statistics of the People’s Republic of China reported a critical decline in population growth last year, citing data for 2019, the birth rate then amounted to 10.48%, 14.65 million newborns. This is the lowest figure since 1949, when the People’s Republic of China was formed.Republic! Therefore, when in mid-May of this year, official statistics reported that the number of newborns in 2020 fell by more than 2 million, the government decided to act quickly and immediately allowed families to have up to 3 children.
Women are in short supply
Stanchenko notes that when the 1979 law on birth control was passed against the background of the baby boom, the authorities did not take into account that it could radically change the psychology of society and its gender composition. After all, these factors have contributed to the fact that the birth rate began to fall much more rapidly than expected.
“I’ll explain. First, the vast majority of Chinese families wanted to have a boy. Therefore, pregnant women, learning about the fact that they will have a girl, had an abortion, says Lydia Stanchenko. This led to the fact that in the early noughties, when the children of families who fell under the”the policy of one child”, grew up and were ready to start their own family, it turned out that women of childbearing age in the country are much less than men. Guys could not find a soul mate simply because there were not enough girls for everyone. By the way, this problem persists to this day.
Not so long ago, some Chinese demographers suggested allowing women to have two husbands, says the Sinologist. The second problem, which Stanchenko points out, is psychological. “As is often the case, the only children in Chinese families focused on themselves all the attention of their parents, grandparents and grandparents. In the resultthey grew up to be individualists, accustomed to living in solitude and caring only for themselves. The desire for privacy among young people is noticeable in China with the naked eye. If the older generation likes to gather in groups and spend time in the company of their peers, then young people are more likely to meet alone, at most two.
What are the families in China?
Anfisa Afonso, English teacher, worked for several years in China, in school, college, kindergarten. According to her, traditions are still strong in China, so people over 30 almost always have a family, but usually there is a maximum of one child. “The topic of sex education in China is directly taboo, so it is quite difficult for guys to get acquainted with girls. To & nbsp; the & nbsp; same,guys get married when they build a house or buy an apartment. Without this, no one will build a relationship with them. And to buy your own home, in China you need to work hard and save for a long time, Anfisa believes. Girls in the city also get married after about 28 years. In the village, such people are already considered old, where it is customary to get married at 20.
Anfisa admits that more children are born in the villages, but for reasons of economy, they simply did not register the child in the past, including labor and assistance on the farm. For the townspeople, a child, even if the tax is abolished,is too expensive. Therefore, large families are either well-off people or villagers.
“The pensions there are small, so the grandparents often live with young families. And they are the ones who take care of the baby, because paid maternity leave in China is only 6 months. But my friend, who still lives there, knows a lot of people who have been working for a month, otherwise it is difficult financially, explains Anfisa.
Anfisa says that the Chinese are very strict parents. “They love children, but I think only their own. I’ve seen cases where a child has gone out on the road, and they don’t even react. Protect in & nbsp; mostly their own. It seems to me that this is a matter of competition, since there are a lot of them and they really want their children to achieve something, the teacher says. That’s why they’re insanely strict.punish children for poor grades. A friend of mine takes her two-year-old son to the “razvivashki”, and there mothers beat such young children for the fact that they do not do something, do not repeat after the teacher. They have got it in their heads that their children should achieve something and take a high position. It is not only the parent who can hit the child, but also the teacher in the school.
How did China react to the innovation?
The new ruling has caused a flurry of sarcastic and irritated comments on Chinese social media, and has also generated a huge number of memes, says Lidia Stanchenko. The Weibo social network, similar to Twitter, has already received more than 4 billion views, and the hashtag, which can be translated as “the three children policy”, has already reached more than 4 billion views. Under the posts of the main state media about the new policy, you can see several hundred thousand commentsand only a few of them are in support of the innovation. Young commentators believe that the new policy will not change anything, since it is far from a matter of whether the state allows more children or not. The main problem, in their opinion, is that the maintenance and education of children is very expensive, and the state does not offer any support to young families. Many people note that even one child is already a lot, not even three.
The state-run Xinhua news Agency even launched a vote on Weibo asking who is willing to take advantage of the new policy. After nearly 30 thousand people voted sharply against the new policy, Xinhua removed the post.
The number of memes and jokes has also spread throughout the Chinese Internet. Perhaps the most popular was the meme on the advertising of condoms “Durex” with the caption “I went, and you have fun”, says Stanchenko.