The matriarchy ruling China's future

Women are voting with their uteruses

Jim/Sara Nuttle illustration from “America’s New Map”

NYT story about how Chinese women are essentially opting out of the nation’s demographic future and, by doing so, drastically altering its trajectory.

The traditional description of how we got here:

In the late 1970s, the government imposed its one-child policy to rein in population growth. But this led to plummeting birthrates, an aging population and a gender imbalance as millions of female fetuses were aborted because of a traditional preference for male heirs. (As of 2020, China still had about 17.5 million more men than women between the ages of 20 and 40, which government media has warned could pose a threat to social stability.)

But this is inaccurate in its presumed causality.

From America’s New Map:

China’s demographic dividend was triggered by a radical decline in fertility. It took America eight decades (1844–1926) to lower fertility from six children per woman to three. China did it in a decade (1967–1978). History attributes that decline to Beijing’s infamous one-child policy, when, in truth, that edict only took effect in 1980, by which time China’s fertility crash was well underway. Tellingly, China’s fertility decline mirrored that of Taiwan across the same decades. Taipei had no such restrictive reproduction policy, suggesting that government policies mandating lower fertility are as ineffective as those promoting the opposite.

So what triggered that huge collapse in fertility across the 1970s? Most logical thing is to blame it on the long shadow of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, which certainly had some scaring-off effect on women throughout the country, as in, Who wants to have a kid amidst this madness? By the time the actual edict came down from on high, well, then you’re looking at all that positive economic reform coming out of Mao’s successor Deng and China is off to the developmental races.

In general, what do we know about impacting female fertility? Again from my book:

Fertility is primarily determined by what happens with girls and women when economic development takes root. If you want a demographic dividend, keep girls in school for as long as possible. It is as simple as that. Better-educated women have fewer kids, who in turn are themselves better educated—an economic win-win. Conversely, the easiest way to sabotage a dividend is to marry off young girls or mandate forced births. Capturing the full demographic dividend requires investment in human capital. Over the period of China’s economic rise, Latin America enjoyed the same demographic opportunity, only to squander it through political corruption, minimal investment in education and health, and limited reproductive rights for women. While China’s GDP increased sevenfold over those decades, Latin America merely doubled its output.

Now, we all know that China rescinded the policy years ago, so what has happened since is a different sort of “voting” on the part of Chinese women. Per the NYT story:

Worried, the government abandoned the one-child policy beginning in 2016, allowing all married couples to have two children and raising that to three in 2021.

But a hoped-for baby boom has not materialized. Marriage registrations have fallen for nine consecutive years leading up to 2022, when they sank to the lowest level since the government began releasing figures in 1986. New births have also continued to fall, with only 9.56 million babies being born last year, the fewest since records began with the founding of Communist China in 1949. The nation’s population shrank in 2022 for the first time in six decades, allowing India to overtake China as the world’s most populous country.

Many young Chinese men are also avoiding marriage. But this seismic demographic shift appears to be driven largely by an increasing unwillingness of women to make the requisite career and lifestyle sacrifices or bear the rising cost of educating children. Recent surveys have shown that young Chinese women have a significantly more negative view of marriage than men.

Now, we can go with this analysis and say, Chinese women don’t see value in marriage and so this is some sociological problem, but I think the causality is more about economics and politics — as in, Chinese women see the burdens of parenthood right now as both risky and unwarranted given the country’s trajectory under Xi.

Understand, Xi has put down quite the marker regarding China’s future simply by ending presidential term limits. This alone is cited as the primary reason for China’s ongoing tech brain-drain.

Xi has gone old school patriarchal across the board, basically purging women from top leadership spots and pushing for a retrograde cultural campaign to promote more traditional roles for women.

Also this from the NYT story:

Mr. Xi’s government has waged a broad crackdown on civil society organizations, making overt feminism dangerous.

Nothing Xi is selling regarding China’s future seems to make any serious room for women to advance themselves. Instead, Xi seems to be offering only an off-ramp for whatever empowerment women currently enjoy in the system.

These women are thus voting no on both Xi and the future he promises for the nation. This clash, per the NYT, is growing:

A clash over control of reproduction now looms, one with great implications for women’s rights and the country’s demographic future. The Communist Party has dug in, identifying Western feminism as an unpatriotic threat to its population-planning objectives and an example of hostile foreign ideological infiltration. Censorship of feminist topics online has intensified, as has misogynistic state propaganda.

But as record-high numbers of Chinese women attend college, interest in feminist issues and asserting one’s reproductive rights has intensified. Women continue to go online to challenge sexism and unequal treatment and exchange ideas. With China’s publishing industry heavily censored, the translated works of feminists like the Japanese scholar Chizuko Ueno have become best-sellers in China.

This is the classic sort of democratization impulse that happens with the rise of a middle class within a society, and it is often fueled most desperately by women uninterested in sliding back into the cultural past when they’ve seen the economic future and begin to demand it politically.

Xi and the Party and Chinese tradition all fight back, just like in the US where White Christian Nationalism does the same across the similar issues, believing that the broad emancipation of women by modern life is what is ruining our culture. Per the previous NYT piece that I recently highlighted about right-wing catastrophists:

Among the most extreme catastrophists writing in this vein is Stephen Wolfe, whose book “The Case for Christian Nationalism” calls for a “just revolution” against America’s “gynocracy” (rule by women) that emasculates men, persuading them to affirm “feminine virtues, such as empathy, fairness and equality.” In its place, Mr. Wolfe proposes the installation of a “Christian prince,” or a form of “theocratic Caesarism.”

There is a lot of right-wing anger against women in our society right now — to include the lamenting of America’s lost masculinity. It is, in my opinion, a driver of the right-wing hatred of America’s primary and secondary teachers (mostly women), who are now blamed for all manner of societal ills.

Back to China in the NYT piece (which is brilliantly written):

As this struggle over who controls reproduction escalates, the government may expand financial or other incentives to encourage childbirth. But given Mr. Xi’s mentality, the government is just as likely to ratchet up pressure on feminism and women’s rights in general. It is already becoming more difficult to get vasectomies.

But the Communist Party’s options are limited. It can’t force women to marry or get pregnant and is unlikely to relax its tight immigration policies to make up for a shrinking work force. Placing even more pressure on women or drastic actions like imposing nationwide bans on abortion or contraception could harden women’s attitudes or even trigger an uprising. Young, educated women were conspicuously on the front lines of protests in several cities in late 2022 against the government’s oppressive pandemic-control policies.

The Communist Party has faced many opponents and dissenters in its decades of rule, quickly silencing and consigning them to oblivion. In the nation’s young women, the party’s male leaders may now be facing their most implacable challengers yet.

My argument on this in America’s New Map is similar:

Your government might go to great lengths to encourage a natural increase (e.g., tax breaks, subsidized childcare, “hero mother” medals). You can add a stick to those carrots by outlawing abortion—even contraception, recasting pregnancy as legal jeopardy.

History says none of these will be enough. China recently rescinded its one-child policy that accompanied a demographic transition of breathtaking speed. But industrialization and urbanization have permanently stunted the average young Chinese’s concept of family size. After thousands of years of exceptionally large families, most Chinese today cannot imagine risking a sec- ond child. That gives you a sense of the enormous power this demographic transition exerts over even the most traditional of civilizations.

These lessons apply to the US as much as China, the difference here being that women can express their desires at the voting booth. To that end, we’ve seen just how profoundly US women with college educations have turned away from the GOP.

The feminization of politics globally is something I’ve written about positively in past books. As political veto powers go, it is an immense one. It is interesting to watch both China and the US deal with this burgeoning power at the same time but under very different political circumstances.

This is a very good thing.