The baby bust is global: China adopts 3-child policy

Two children were added to "A Better Future” in Wuhan’s Jiangtan Park recently. Photo: Yu Ping/Yangtze Daily

China dropped the one-child policy in 2015, after 30 years. The new slogan was: "One child is too few, while two are just right." Birth rates remained low. In 2021, China began urging parents to have three children. It's "a tough sell," writes

Joyce Jiang for CNN.

China’s National Health Commission is issuing “birth-friendly theme posters," she writes. Online, Chinese recall the old slogans: “Fewer kids, happier lives,” and, “If you want to be rich, have fewer children and plant more trees.”

China's fertility rate is at the one-child-per-lifetime level of 1.0, less than half the 2.1 replacement rate needed to maintain the population. It's "the second lowest among the world’s major economies," writes Jiang. In China’s richest city, Shanghai, the fertility rate is 0.6. About half of women remain childless.

Last month, the Communist Party proposed childbirth subsidies and more affordable childcare, she reports. Local governments are offering baby bonuses and housing aid.

Fertility rates are falling in most of the world, reports Tory Shepherd in The Guardian (Australia).

It’s fairly clear that, when women are more educated, more liberated, and more able to access contraception, they start having fewer children. What’s not clear is how to convince them to have more. Cheaper childcare? More flexible workplaces? More help from the menfolk? Affordable housing? More optimism about the future?

Birth rates will fall below the replacement rate in more than three-quarters of the world, predicts a study by the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME).

Pro-natal policies "such as free childcare, better parental care leave, financial incentives and employment rights" may slow the decline, but won't boost fertility rates to replacement levels, researchers predicted.

In the U.S., church-going women have significantly more children than secular women. Jews are tied with Pentecostal Christians for high fertility, probably due to the high birth rate in ultra-Orthodox Jewish families.

Lots of people want to move to the U.S., so I assume we'll be able to maintain the population. But countries that don't do immigration well, such as Japan and Korea, will face big decisions: Go gray or learn to assimilate new people. And what about poor countries with low birth rates?