The direct impact on China after abolishing its three-decade-long “one-child policy” will be shown on the nation’s population distribution chart in the decade ahead, something not so much visible to us readers at this moment. However, the actual effectiveness of this policy has nothing to do with the population, but like so many other things, it has a lot to do with money. Underneath the umbrella term, two things in particular: whether it will become more expensive or less to raise a child in China, and further down the road, if the change of policy would actually mean more money in the nation’s welfare system.
The first question is easy to answer. No. Raising a child in China will only become more expensive, not less.
Earlier this year, China Daily reported that according to a research published by the Chinese Academy of Social Science, it costs approximately ¥490,000 (about $77,000) in direct economic cost to raise one unmarried child who was not a student to university graduation in China. That is not including the increase of cost in family as a whole (for example, more children generally means need for larger living space, which means higher rent cost or mortgage payment) or opportunity cost (something almost no parents ever calculated in raising children).
The research was extremely controversial around China’s social media sites, as many commented that 500K yuan is covering the bare minimum. The research was based on the economic development level in Shanghai in 2003, so many parents believe the cost today is much higher. After all, it is not an isolated case when one reads something like this one about a pair of parents in Beijing having already spent ¥100,000 on their 18-month-old newborn.
It is still, and will continue to be of most Chinese parents’ top priority to invest in their children’s education. And better education extends far beyond private schools and after-school tutors. It takes effect in industries like real estate (sending kids off to schools further away from home often means buying or renting another house/apartment nearby, let that be in another district, city, or country) and automobile market (if you go walk around a car dealership in China and ask why the people there are buying cars, “having to take my kid to school” will be an answer that you are surprised you hear too often), among many others.
The motivation behind all the effort is “competition.” There are so many people in the country, and the resource is often scarce. Decades ago, this resource was referring to higher education. But when higher ed became relatively more accessible in recent years, the resource becomes the available job opportunities. Although learning how to play the piano or excelling in that Olympiad level math test doesn’t guarantee one a job, many Chinese parents chose to take all possible measure if it means a brighter perspective for their kids’ future.
This means a paradox in the question of the cost of raising children. The more children there are, the stiffer the competition it seems, the more necessary it appears to be for parents to invest in their children’s education, which would continue to pump up the cost of raising one. And the higher the cost, the more hesitant people become about having more children, even just one.
One have argued that 500K is only applicable to the newly-emerged middle-class, white collar families in China. And that’s a fair judgment. This number fluctuates greatly as the geographical location, the socioeconomic background of the families and other factors change when we look at different families in this vast country. But the newly-emerged middle-class, white collar families also happen to be the target group of the new two-children policy.
Before the abolishment, the one-child policy has always been more-strictly enforced in urban area than rural area. Many reasons attribute to that: the inaction of more gross-roots governmental units, the lower fine in areas with a lower per capita income (the exact amount of fine is never something written into the law), the culture of raising children as a form of pension, which stemmed from the more agricultural-based rural society.
The fact is, many rural families have more than one child. I have come across less than a handful of rural families who do. The dozen others I know have two or more. Three is not unusual. The families who are strictly following the one-child policy are government employees (if they get caught having more than one child, they lose they jobs) and small business owners who can’t afford the high fines in the cities. These happened to be the same group who may consider having another child, but find the cost of doing so too high to manage.
“Those who want more kids have already done so regardless of the policy,” many Chinese have told me. “Those who haven’t done so aren’t going to do it anyway, regardless of the policy.”
I talk more about the end of one-child policy in China, plus many other things, in my weekly Mandarin feminism podcast. You can find the podcast on SoundCloud. Here is my latest episode, discussing female body.
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