Today is Children’s Day. But the fact that the decision-makers in Beijing announced the three-child policy just one day earlier is seen by many Chinese more as an affront than a family-friendly measure intended to boost the birth rate in the People’s Republic. Because to achieve this, there should have been childcare subsidies, reductions in the horrendous school fees in the big cities, or simply a plan on how to reconcile work and family life in an increasingly competitive environment. Michael Radunski spoke with sociologists and family experts about the core of the surprising “three instead of one” family plan and shows that concerns about an aging society are driving those in power in Beijing. A shortage of young workers threatens a “decline in the economy.” China could lose its most important trump card in the struggle with the US.
Imagine being rewarded for sorting waste. Yes, really. You’ll even be paid money for it. In Changsha in the south of the country, the Chinese government has introduced a bonus system that is intended to make waste separation via QR code not only easy, but also attractive. Every registered household can collect points. Frank Sierra’s Feature shows that German waste disposal companies from Berlin to Munich are also involved.
China’s government wants to allow married couples to have three children. The state news agency Xinhua reported this on Monday, citing a Politburo meeting led by President Xi Jinping. “Allowing all couples to have three children will help improve the population structure,” the news agency quoted from the meeting. The aim, it said, was to “further optimize birth policies.” However, it is still unclear when the new permission will come into effect.
In addition to the three-child policy, it was decided to raise the retirement age gradually. This is a plan already adopted in the current five-year plan. But details were sparse on Monday.
“Monday’s decisions are the policy response to the low birth rate and aging of Chinese society as revealed by the 7th National Population Census, the results of which were recently released,” Kaijun Chen, a sociologist by training at Oxford University and now a sustainability consultant in Beijing, told China Table.
That census shows that China’s population has grown by 0.53 percent annually over the past decade to 1.41 billion people – the lowest rate in decades (China Table reported: Census shows population decline). Statistically, a woman has 1.3 children. This puts China on par with aging societies such as industrialized Japan and Italy. Experts warn that China’s population could shrink as early as this year if this trend continues. Although the relevant authorities vehemently deny this, even the official agencies expect a decline by 2027 at the latest (China Table reported: Aging population offers opportunities for German economy).
“The Chinese authorities have been quick to announce a three-child policy because they know the real data from the census. They don’t want to publish them, but they are so frightening that they have to act now,” says Chinese family policy expert Yi Fuxian in an interview with China.Table.
It was not until 2015 that an attempt to change course was made: The one-child policy that had been in place since 1979 was abolished; from now on, couples were allowed to have two children. This briefly led to a slight increase in births in 2016, but since then, the number has fallen year after year.
And so the diagnosis is clear: China’s population is aging before the country has managed to achieve a sufficiently high level of prosperity. The unequal gender ratio will continue to cause frustration among many men in the coming decades because they will not be able to find a partner. And the birth rate is still falling. “The two-child policy came too late and was too little. It will be the same now with the three-child policy,” predicts Yi Fuxian.
In the economy, however, Monday’s decision by the Communist Party initially created a good mood: hoping for a baby boom, the share values of companies in the industries of artificial insemination, obstetrics, and baby products rose.
However, Kaijun Chen does not believe the effect will be lasting. “The measures adopted will not have the effect that is hoped for.” He said changing from a two-child to a three-child policy will not solve the real problems. The low birth rate is not related to couples who already have two children and would like to have a third, he said. “It’s about young Chinese people, married and single. They don’t plan to have children at all,” Chen says, listing the reasons: Often, it is the enormous pressure at work that is in the way of a life with children. In addition, there are high housing and rent costs in China’s big cities, as well as enormous expenses for childcare, education and school. Fifteen years ago, it cost an average family in China just under $75,000 to raise a child. By 2020, the cost was already around $300,000.
All this was also reflected in the reactions of citizens on social networks on Monday. Many users pointed to the sharp rise in the cost of living in cities, which is why more and more couples are foregoing having children altogether. “I’m willing to have three children if you give me ¥5 million (about €645,000),” wrote one user on the short message service Weibo, for example.
Accordingly, the shift to the three-child policy should be accompanied by “supportive measures that contribute to the improvement of our country’s population structure,” Xinhua quoted from the Politburo meeting. However, no details were given.
Low birth rates and an old society could dramatically impact China’s economic development. “If the labor force becomes smaller, the economy will start to decline,” Yi Fuxian says. China’s growth will flatten, the scholar predicts. From 2030 to 2035, China’s growth will be less than the US, he said. “It will become impossible to replace the US as the largest economy.”
Interventions in private family planning have a long tradition in China. One child per family – that was the guideline from 1979 onwards. With this “one-child policy”, the rulers in Beijing wanted to slow down population growth, prevent a food shortage like that caused by the devastating famine between 1958 and 1962, and support the incipient economic boom. There were some exceptions – for ethnic minorities, for example, or part of the peasantry. In addition, from 1984 on, parents in rural areas were allowed to have a second child if their firstborn was a girl.
Overall, however, the one-child policy was consistently enforced. The average number of children born to a woman in China fell from almost 4.9 in 1975 to around 2.5 in 1995 – and ten years later the birth rate was only 1.6. The Chinese Communist Party boasted that it had prevented between 400 and 600 million births. But demographers point out that a decline in the birth rate with rising prosperity would have set in even without the rigid measures.
Economically, the calculation worked out, and years of unbridled economic growth followed. But socially as well as demographically, the rigid guidelines had dramatic downsides: forced abortions even in later stages of pregnancy, the selective killing of female fetuses, and ultimately a massive surplus of men as well as a severe aging of Chinese society.
The one-child policy also exposed the inequality between rich and poor: Violations of the one-child rule were subject to massive fines, the so-called social compensation fee. Especially couples in the glittering metropolises who could afford it accepted such penalties for having a second child. In 2014, the well-known film director Zhang Yimou could afford to pay a fine of the equivalent of $1.2 million for violating the state’s one-child policy.
In 2016, a big change followed: the end of the one-child policy. But the state restrictions were not lifted, only relaxed so that all couples were allowed to have two children.
There is also sharp criticism of the new three-child policy. “Governments have no business regulating how many children couples have. Rather than tweak birth policies, China should respect people’s life choices and end all invasive and punitive controls over people’s family planning decisions,” says Joshua Rosenzweig, China Chief of the human rights organization Amnesty International. “Raising the limit from two children to three would bring China no closer to meeting its human rights obligations.” Everyone should have the right to decide for themselves if and when they want to have children, Rosenzweig urges.
Yi Fuxian also finds harsh words in an interview with China.Table: “The three-child policy that has now been adopted is also an instrument of population control. It shows that China’s authorities still can’t keep their hands off people’s genitals.”
It is fair to say that Bytedance founder Zhang Yiming is not a particularly talented manager. That may sound silly because, within nine years, he has created a digital platform with his Chinese start-up that has kept its customers worldwide glued to their screens longer than Facebook, Instagram, and the like. But Zhang made this claim himself just a few days ago. And he did so just a few months after his video portal TikTok took over the world’s top spot in the battle for Internet users’ attention for the first time.
“The truth is, I lack some of the skills that make an ideal manager,” Zhang Yiming had written. The sentence was part of a detailed explanation of why the 38-year-old apparently voluntarily vacated the chief executive post of his billion-dollar company in mid-May. In an open letter to Bytedance employees, he announced that co-founder Liang Rubo would run the business in the future. During a six-month transition period, Zhang Yiming will oversee the change to give his successor a smooth start. He wants to have more time to come up with new ideas, develop long-term strategies or deal with social responsibility, he announced.
As a teenager, Zhang Yiming began studying microelectronics in the coastal city of Tianjin, near Beijing. He later switched to software technology and graduated in 2005. When he founded Bytedance in 2012, he had already gained a lot of experience at various companies. Among others, he joined Microsoft in 2008. A year later, he founded his first company, 99fang.com, which offered services in the real estate sector.
Meanwhile, the retreat from the chief executive post of major Chinese tech companies seems to be setting a precedent in China. Alibaba founder Jack Ma was the first to step down in 2019. Then, in March this year, Pinduoduo boss Colin Huang also decided he wanted to be a scientist rather than a manager after building his e-commerce company into one of China’s biggest. So Zhang Yiming is the next high-profile retreat in an industry that has come under increasing scrutiny from government overseers in recent years, with ever stricter regulation. The Chinese government is not comfortable with the rapidly growing online empires with their dynamism and market power. President Xi Jinping even considers the control of Internet companies indispensable to ensure social stability.
The timing of Zhang Yiming’s announcement is astonishing. TikTok experienced a spectacular boom in 2020 and was proud to announce at the end of the year that its followers are the most loyal of all fans of online social platforms: worldwide and also in Germany. Here, the app ranked first for the first time, with 19.1 hours of average usage per month (worldwide: 21.5), around twice as much as the year before. Other platforms such as Facebook or WhatsApp also increased, but in no way comparable to the explosion of the Chinese portal.
Worldwide, 1.2 billion people now use the TikTok app. In the US alone, there are around 100 million, although the application came under suspicion of being a risk to national security last year. The Trump administration at the time even wanted to ban TikTok in the American market, fearing that US users’ data would fall into the hands of the Chinese government. Chinese internet companies are required by law to provide the government with all of their users’ data if it asks for it. At least the data that is stored on Chinese servers.
Meanwhile, the European consumer association BEUC warned last week of TikTok’s violations of consumer law and has prompted the EU Commission to conduct a review. Consumer advocates accuse TikTok of hidden marketing and aggressive advertising techniques aimed at children. The company must therefore respond to the accusations within one month.
The Australian Strategy Policy Institute (ASPI) is also critical of the application, which is not called TikTok in China, but Douyin. Its study found that TikTok’s algorithm places content in the interests of the Chinese government and hides unwelcome sequences. For example, when it comes to Xinjiang, users get to see mostly happily dancing Uyghurs. Videos that address the massive human rights crimes are much harder to find.
Nevertheless, TikTok’s triumphant march picked up tremendously last year. Zhang Yiming integrated online sales into the video service in 2020, generating $26 billion in revenue last year from sales of makeup, clothing, and merchandise. Alibaba’s digital marketplace Taobao took six years to reach that volume. The growth is crying out for an IPO of Bytedance, which has been rumored for a while and whose volume could set gigantic standards in the tech industry. The company could be valued at around $200 billion in an IPO.
So why is Zhang Yiming handing over the reins on the eve of his company’s greatest triumph? “I’m more interested in analyzing organizational and market principles, and leveraging these theories to further reduce management work, rather than actually managing people,” he wrote. He is not a particularly social person, he said, but one who prefers to read, surf the net, or “daydream about what may be possible.”
However, it won’t be quite so lonely for Zhang Yiming if his announcement is to be believed. He is looking forward to the new stage and to “continuing the journey of Bytedance together with his comrades-in-arms”. Marcel Grzanna
Children in Chongqing are racing against mini pigs to celebrate Children’s Day. Who finishes first doesn’t matter: Only the children get a prize.
Today is Children’s Day. But the fact that the decision-makers in Beijing announced the three-child policy just one day earlier is seen by many Chinese more as an affront than a family-friendly measure intended to boost the birth rate in the People’s Republic. Because to achieve this, there should have been childcare subsidies, reductions in the horrendous school fees in the big cities, or simply a plan on how to reconcile work and family life in an increasingly competitive environment. Michael Radunski spoke with sociologists and family experts about the core of the surprising “three instead of one” family plan and shows that concerns about an aging society are driving those in power in Beijing. A shortage of young workers threatens a “decline in the economy.” China could lose its most important trump card in the struggle with the US.
Imagine being rewarded for sorting waste. Yes, really. You’ll even be paid money for it. In Changsha in the south of the country, the Chinese government has introduced a bonus system that is intended to make waste separation via QR code not only easy, but also attractive. Every registered household can collect points. Frank Sierra’s Feature shows that German waste disposal companies from Berlin to Munich are also involved.
China’s government wants to allow married couples to have three children. The state news agency Xinhua reported this on Monday, citing a Politburo meeting led by President Xi Jinping. “Allowing all couples to have three children will help improve the population structure,” the news agency quoted from the meeting. The aim, it said, was to “further optimize birth policies.” However, it is still unclear when the new permission will come into effect.
In addition to the three-child policy, it was decided to raise the retirement age gradually. This is a plan already adopted in the current five-year plan. But details were sparse on Monday.
“Monday’s decisions are the policy response to the low birth rate and aging of Chinese society as revealed by the 7th National Population Census, the results of which were recently released,” Kaijun Chen, a sociologist by training at Oxford University and now a sustainability consultant in Beijing, told China Table.
That census shows that China’s population has grown by 0.53 percent annually over the past decade to 1.41 billion people – the lowest rate in decades (China Table reported: Census shows population decline). Statistically, a woman has 1.3 children. This puts China on par with aging societies such as industrialized Japan and Italy. Experts warn that China’s population could shrink as early as this year if this trend continues. Although the relevant authorities vehemently deny this, even the official agencies expect a decline by 2027 at the latest (China Table reported: Aging population offers opportunities for German economy).
“The Chinese authorities have been quick to announce a three-child policy because they know the real data from the census. They don’t want to publish them, but they are so frightening that they have to act now,” says Chinese family policy expert Yi Fuxian in an interview with China.Table.
It was not until 2015 that an attempt to change course was made: The one-child policy that had been in place since 1979 was abolished; from now on, couples were allowed to have two children. This briefly led to a slight increase in births in 2016, but since then, the number has fallen year after year.
And so the diagnosis is clear: China’s population is aging before the country has managed to achieve a sufficiently high level of prosperity. The unequal gender ratio will continue to cause frustration among many men in the coming decades because they will not be able to find a partner. And the birth rate is still falling. “The two-child policy came too late and was too little. It will be the same now with the three-child policy,” predicts Yi Fuxian.
In the economy, however, Monday’s decision by the Communist Party initially created a good mood: hoping for a baby boom, the share values of companies in the industries of artificial insemination, obstetrics, and baby products rose.
However, Kaijun Chen does not believe the effect will be lasting. “The measures adopted will not have the effect that is hoped for.” He said changing from a two-child to a three-child policy will not solve the real problems. The low birth rate is not related to couples who already have two children and would like to have a third, he said. “It’s about young Chinese people, married and single. They don’t plan to have children at all,” Chen says, listing the reasons: Often, it is the enormous pressure at work that is in the way of a life with children. In addition, there are high housing and rent costs in China’s big cities, as well as enormous expenses for childcare, education and school. Fifteen years ago, it cost an average family in China just under $75,000 to raise a child. By 2020, the cost was already around $300,000.
All this was also reflected in the reactions of citizens on social networks on Monday. Many users pointed to the sharp rise in the cost of living in cities, which is why more and more couples are foregoing having children altogether. “I’m willing to have three children if you give me ¥5 million (about €645,000),” wrote one user on the short message service Weibo, for example.
Accordingly, the shift to the three-child policy should be accompanied by “supportive measures that contribute to the improvement of our country’s population structure,” Xinhua quoted from the Politburo meeting. However, no details were given.
Low birth rates and an old society could dramatically impact China’s economic development. “If the labor force becomes smaller, the economy will start to decline,” Yi Fuxian says. China’s growth will flatten, the scholar predicts. From 2030 to 2035, China’s growth will be less than the US, he said. “It will become impossible to replace the US as the largest economy.”
Interventions in private family planning have a long tradition in China. One child per family – that was the guideline from 1979 onwards. With this “one-child policy”, the rulers in Beijing wanted to slow down population growth, prevent a food shortage like that caused by the devastating famine between 1958 and 1962, and support the incipient economic boom. There were some exceptions – for ethnic minorities, for example, or part of the peasantry. In addition, from 1984 on, parents in rural areas were allowed to have a second child if their firstborn was a girl.
Overall, however, the one-child policy was consistently enforced. The average number of children born to a woman in China fell from almost 4.9 in 1975 to around 2.5 in 1995 – and ten years later the birth rate was only 1.6. The Chinese Communist Party boasted that it had prevented between 400 and 600 million births. But demographers point out that a decline in the birth rate with rising prosperity would have set in even without the rigid measures.
Economically, the calculation worked out, and years of unbridled economic growth followed. But socially as well as demographically, the rigid guidelines had dramatic downsides: forced abortions even in later stages of pregnancy, the selective killing of female fetuses, and ultimately a massive surplus of men as well as a severe aging of Chinese society.
The one-child policy also exposed the inequality between rich and poor: Violations of the one-child rule were subject to massive fines, the so-called social compensation fee. Especially couples in the glittering metropolises who could afford it accepted such penalties for having a second child. In 2014, the well-known film director Zhang Yimou could afford to pay a fine of the equivalent of $1.2 million for violating the state’s one-child policy.
In 2016, a big change followed: the end of the one-child policy. But the state restrictions were not lifted, only relaxed so that all couples were allowed to have two children.
There is also sharp criticism of the new three-child policy. “Governments have no business regulating how many children couples have. Rather than tweak birth policies, China should respect people’s life choices and end all invasive and punitive controls over people’s family planning decisions,” says Joshua Rosenzweig, China Chief of the human rights organization Amnesty International. “Raising the limit from two children to three would bring China no closer to meeting its human rights obligations.” Everyone should have the right to decide for themselves if and when they want to have children, Rosenzweig urges.
Yi Fuxian also finds harsh words in an interview with China.Table: “The three-child policy that has now been adopted is also an instrument of population control. It shows that China’s authorities still can’t keep their hands off people’s genitals.”
It is fair to say that Bytedance founder Zhang Yiming is not a particularly talented manager. That may sound silly because, within nine years, he has created a digital platform with his Chinese start-up that has kept its customers worldwide glued to their screens longer than Facebook, Instagram, and the like. But Zhang made this claim himself just a few days ago. And he did so just a few months after his video portal TikTok took over the world’s top spot in the battle for Internet users’ attention for the first time.
“The truth is, I lack some of the skills that make an ideal manager,” Zhang Yiming had written. The sentence was part of a detailed explanation of why the 38-year-old apparently voluntarily vacated the chief executive post of his billion-dollar company in mid-May. In an open letter to Bytedance employees, he announced that co-founder Liang Rubo would run the business in the future. During a six-month transition period, Zhang Yiming will oversee the change to give his successor a smooth start. He wants to have more time to come up with new ideas, develop long-term strategies or deal with social responsibility, he announced.
As a teenager, Zhang Yiming began studying microelectronics in the coastal city of Tianjin, near Beijing. He later switched to software technology and graduated in 2005. When he founded Bytedance in 2012, he had already gained a lot of experience at various companies. Among others, he joined Microsoft in 2008. A year later, he founded his first company, 99fang.com, which offered services in the real estate sector.
Meanwhile, the retreat from the chief executive post of major Chinese tech companies seems to be setting a precedent in China. Alibaba founder Jack Ma was the first to step down in 2019. Then, in March this year, Pinduoduo boss Colin Huang also decided he wanted to be a scientist rather than a manager after building his e-commerce company into one of China’s biggest. So Zhang Yiming is the next high-profile retreat in an industry that has come under increasing scrutiny from government overseers in recent years, with ever stricter regulation. The Chinese government is not comfortable with the rapidly growing online empires with their dynamism and market power. President Xi Jinping even considers the control of Internet companies indispensable to ensure social stability.
The timing of Zhang Yiming’s announcement is astonishing. TikTok experienced a spectacular boom in 2020 and was proud to announce at the end of the year that its followers are the most loyal of all fans of online social platforms: worldwide and also in Germany. Here, the app ranked first for the first time, with 19.1 hours of average usage per month (worldwide: 21.5), around twice as much as the year before. Other platforms such as Facebook or WhatsApp also increased, but in no way comparable to the explosion of the Chinese portal.
Worldwide, 1.2 billion people now use the TikTok app. In the US alone, there are around 100 million, although the application came under suspicion of being a risk to national security last year. The Trump administration at the time even wanted to ban TikTok in the American market, fearing that US users’ data would fall into the hands of the Chinese government. Chinese internet companies are required by law to provide the government with all of their users’ data if it asks for it. At least the data that is stored on Chinese servers.
Meanwhile, the European consumer association BEUC warned last week of TikTok’s violations of consumer law and has prompted the EU Commission to conduct a review. Consumer advocates accuse TikTok of hidden marketing and aggressive advertising techniques aimed at children. The company must therefore respond to the accusations within one month.
The Australian Strategy Policy Institute (ASPI) is also critical of the application, which is not called TikTok in China, but Douyin. Its study found that TikTok’s algorithm places content in the interests of the Chinese government and hides unwelcome sequences. For example, when it comes to Xinjiang, users get to see mostly happily dancing Uyghurs. Videos that address the massive human rights crimes are much harder to find.
Nevertheless, TikTok’s triumphant march picked up tremendously last year. Zhang Yiming integrated online sales into the video service in 2020, generating $26 billion in revenue last year from sales of makeup, clothing, and merchandise. Alibaba’s digital marketplace Taobao took six years to reach that volume. The growth is crying out for an IPO of Bytedance, which has been rumored for a while and whose volume could set gigantic standards in the tech industry. The company could be valued at around $200 billion in an IPO.
So why is Zhang Yiming handing over the reins on the eve of his company’s greatest triumph? “I’m more interested in analyzing organizational and market principles, and leveraging these theories to further reduce management work, rather than actually managing people,” he wrote. He is not a particularly social person, he said, but one who prefers to read, surf the net, or “daydream about what may be possible.”
However, it won’t be quite so lonely for Zhang Yiming if his announcement is to be believed. He is looking forward to the new stage and to “continuing the journey of Bytedance together with his comrades-in-arms”. Marcel Grzanna
Children in Chongqing are racing against mini pigs to celebrate Children’s Day. Who finishes first doesn’t matter: Only the children get a prize.
