Tag: Birth Control and Family Planning

Three Is Best: How China’s Family Planning Propaganda Has Changed

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For decades, China harshly restricted the number of children couples could have, arguing that everyone would be better off with fewer mouths to feed. The government’s one-child policy was woven into the fabric of everyday life, through slogans on street banners and in popular culture and public art. Now, faced with a shrinking and aging population, China is using many of the same propaganda channels to send the opposite message: Have more babies. The government has also been offering financial incentives for couples to have two or three children. But…

The Scientist Who Foresaw China’s Stagnation

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Adam Posen, the president of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, described China as suffering from a case of economic long Covid. In an article in the September-October issue of Foreign Affairs, he wrote: Like a patient suffering from that chronic condition, China’s body economic has not regained its vitality and remains sluggish even now that the acute phase — three years of exceedingly strict and costly “zero Covid” lockdown measures — has ended. The condition is systemic, and the only reliable cure — credibly assuring ordinary Chinese people and…

Today’s Top News: The Blinken-Xi Meeting, and More

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The New York Times Audio app includes podcasts, narrated articles from the newsroom and other publishers, as well as exclusive new shows — including this one — which we’re making available to readers for a limited time. Download the audio app here. The Headlines brings you the biggest stories of the day from the Times journalists who are covering them, all in about 10 minutes. Hosted by Annie Correal, the new morning show features three top stories from reporters across the newsroom and around the world, so you always have…

Why China’s Shrinking Population Is a Problem for Everyone

Chin@Strategy

Despite the rollback of China’s one-child policy, and even after more recent incentives urging families to have more children, China’s population is steadily shrinking — a momentous shift that will soon leave India as the world’s most populous nation and have broad rippling effects both domestically and globally. The change puts China on the same course of both aging and shrinking as many of its neighbors in Asia, but its path will have outsize effects not just on the regional economy, but on the world at large as well. Here’s…

Can China Reverse Its Population Decline? Just Ask Sweden.

Chin@Strategy

China’s population has begun to decline, a demographic turning point for the country that has global implications. Experts had long anticipated this moment, but it arrived in 2022 several years earlier than expected, prompting hand-wringing among economists over the long-term impacts given the country’s immense economic heft and its role as the world’s manufacturer. With 850,000 fewer births than deaths last year, at least according to the country’s official report, China joined an expanding set of nations with shrinking populations caused by years of falling fertility and often little or…

China Helped Raise My American Kids, and They Turned Out Fine

Chin@Strategy

When Covid was raging across the world a couple of years ago, I came across a picture online of an American woman wearing a T-shirt that proclaimed, “I refuse to co-parent with the government” — a response to perceived government overreach regarding school mask mandates. I laughed out loud: My own kids were, in a way, co-parented by the Chinese government. My work in the fashion industry took my husband and me to Shanghai in 2006, where we spent the next 16 years and started a family. In China, government…

China’s Abortion Vow Sparks Worries About Limits

Chin@Strategy

On social media on Monday, after some state-backed news outlets highlighted the line about abortion in the guidelines, some users wondered whether more restrictions were on the way. “Contraception can fail, so not finding a partner is the safest bet,” said one popular comment on the Weibo social media platform. In general, many women are deeply suspicious of how the government will try to boost the country’s anemic birthrates, said Lu Pin, a Chinese feminist activist. Earlier this year, the government imposed a cooling-off period for couples seeking divorce, which…