[This isn’t a real essay or anything. I got inspired by the new study and hurriedly typed this out over the course of a couple of days while dealing with vomiting kids. Read it like the ramblings of an amateur on the internet please.] Okay, so, this study
I've been following you for months now without an account, but I felt so compelled when I realized how much this has influenced my thinking about China. Every other blog or series about them has a macro approach about the economy or statistics or political history, but this day-to-day with your clarifying commentary puts things in an incredibly rich context.
"The problem was never why people don’t want kids. I’ve never seen a group of people more enthusiastically, desperately wanting kids than Chinese people. Chinese people may want kids more than anyone else in the world."
This is interesting, because it's a common problem in fertility discussions. People consistently want WAY more kids than they actually have. Surveys of young women in Western countries pretty consistently find a desired number of children around 2.5. If the TFR of any Western country was anywhere near 2.5, we'd be living in a very different world right now.
The impression I got from the translated posts was that this was noticeably less true in China -- that people were much more resigned to "actively not wanting" kids. Anglophone social media has a lot of childfree-posting too, but it doesn't look as relentlessly "if you mention having a kid all the top comments are mocking you for being a terrible person".
I've generally parsed China's fertility crisis as a "conservatism paradox" -- you see the same thing in Southern and Eastern Europe, the richer parts of Latin America, and, increasingly, Southeast Asia. Countries that are more liberal, have egalitarian gender roles, etc. have a bunch of fertility problems, and conservative people are disproportionately the ones having kids...but conservative/sexist/etc countries that get rich are *totally screwed* on a whole different level. Countries that lack any real options for working mothers, fertility preservation, etc are doing way worse than countries where those things are possible. If "family vs career" becomes a forced choice, everyone ends up with the latter.
Completely off-topic but I thought you might be interested in this list of Chinese imperial dynasties as Simpsons quotes: https://64.media.tumblr.com/45ce0f02874bd90e8a0fd0876a6665e6/53fc07947af91bed-9a/s1280x1920/83bed4c9fb4f6f3591cb9af768dd11096459e451.jpg
Omfg you guys have a maintenance of parents act too! Talk about culture transcending emigration.
Hi!
I just wanted to say thanks for these posts.
I've been following you for months now without an account, but I felt so compelled when I realized how much this has influenced my thinking about China. Every other blog or series about them has a macro approach about the economy or statistics or political history, but this day-to-day with your clarifying commentary puts things in an incredibly rich context.
Fascinating!
I have two questions. Are both males and females required to pay for their parents care, or only boys? Also, what is a 996 job?
"The problem was never why people don’t want kids. I’ve never seen a group of people more enthusiastically, desperately wanting kids than Chinese people. Chinese people may want kids more than anyone else in the world."
This is interesting, because it's a common problem in fertility discussions. People consistently want WAY more kids than they actually have. Surveys of young women in Western countries pretty consistently find a desired number of children around 2.5. If the TFR of any Western country was anywhere near 2.5, we'd be living in a very different world right now.
The impression I got from the translated posts was that this was noticeably less true in China -- that people were much more resigned to "actively not wanting" kids. Anglophone social media has a lot of childfree-posting too, but it doesn't look as relentlessly "if you mention having a kid all the top comments are mocking you for being a terrible person".
I've generally parsed China's fertility crisis as a "conservatism paradox" -- you see the same thing in Southern and Eastern Europe, the richer parts of Latin America, and, increasingly, Southeast Asia. Countries that are more liberal, have egalitarian gender roles, etc. have a bunch of fertility problems, and conservative people are disproportionately the ones having kids...but conservative/sexist/etc countries that get rich are *totally screwed* on a whole different level. Countries that lack any real options for working mothers, fertility preservation, etc are doing way worse than countries where those things are possible. If "family vs career" becomes a forced choice, everyone ends up with the latter.