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Adult children around the world returning home for festive celebrations often face the same fate: parents keen to share increasingly firm views on their life choices, from how to stack the dishwasher to who they should date.
But few parents have honed their tactics quite like Chinese elders when it comes to cajoling their children into marriage and parenthood. The methods range from the mildly intrusive to the outright extreme.
Every year, I hear of at least one blind date engineered by parents that collapses almost immediately — often because one, or both, participants were unaware that they were on a date. One set of wealthy parents threatened to cut off allowances to their 30-something son unless he produced an heir. A friend in Beijing told me his elderly father had grown so despondent about his chances of having a grandchild that he had paid a substantial deposit to a US surrogacy agency in order to have another child himself.
The mixture of incentives — from outright bribery to subtler forms of psychological pressure — is clearly not working. China’s birth figures continue to slide. Last year there were just 7.92mn newborns, the lowest figure since records began and less than half the number born a decade ago.
There is no neat way to disentangle the forces behind young people’s reluctance to marry and have children in China. The legacy of the one-child policy looms large, as do a slowing economy, prolonged property crisis and a deepening gender imbalance. Women now outnumber men at university. In the countryside, men outnumber women, both a result of historic sex-selective abortions and women migrating to cities for jobs.
But the relentless pressure on young people, both from parents and increasingly from the state, may also be entrenching resistance rather than easing it. Psychologists have long observed that sustained nagging can provoke a defensive response triggered when people feel their autonomy is under threat.
For many young Chinese, decisions about marriage and children are among the last areas where they feel able to exercise full agency, particularly in an unforgiving labour market. Those in their late twenties and thirties grew up during an era of breakneck growth, only to graduate into adulthood just as that sense of possibility was abruptly withdrawn.
While jobs are a constant source of conversation, many people I meet appear totally uninterested in dating. Each has their own set of reasons. China’s office culture, with its long hours and weekend shifts, leaves little time or energy for romantic socialising. For others, the growing proliferation of divorces and tales of unhappy marriages have served as a cautionary tale.
At the same time, men and women are diverging sharply in their expectations of relationships. Within marriage, even women who are highly educated and economically independent are expected to conform to rigid gender roles. Many men complain that women are overly materialistic and have unrealistic expectations. Social media, though not fractured as it is in the west, still plays a role in entrenching gender stereotypes that have cleaved the two sexes apart.
This all helps to explain the online mockery that has greeted many of the government’s ham-fisted attempts to boost fertility: from slogans urging births as a patriotic duty to a recent move to scrap tax exemptions on contraceptives.
Such policies are easy to ridicule because they are easy to ignore — unlike the state’s power in many other areas of private life. That power was on full display during the zero-Covid era, when China imposed some of the world’s most hardline quarantine measures.
Most young people in China are not rejecting parenthood out of wilful obstinacy. But constant pressure has produced its own coping mechanisms. Online guides circulate, offering scripts to deflect parental inquisitions over the holidays (there is, as yet, no guide for those whose parents are seeking surrogates).
Some singletons are hiring fake partners to maintain domestic peace. Others use generative AI to fabricate images of broken bones. Armed with this, they can avoid the journey home altogether.