Will China Forcibly Boost Fertility?

By Yi Fuxian, Project Syndicate

China is widely expected to adopt a range of pronatalist policies in a bid to raise birth rates. But recent efforts to encourage women to have more babies will have short-lived effects, while coercive measures – such as bans on contraception and abortion – would trigger a public backlash and prove futile at best.

MADISON – When China implemented its one-child policy in 1980, it also raised the barriers to marriage and made divorce easier. Later, in 1991, the government introduced the “one-vote veto” system, which linked party cadres’ promotion to meeting population-control goals. These moves, coupled with coercive measures such as forced abortions and enormous fines for having more than one child, efficiently contributed to the rapid decline of the fertility rate from 2.3 in 1990 to 1.22 in 2000.

That trend has proven difficult to reverse. Now with one of the world’s lowest fertility rates, China is widely expected to adopt a range of pronatalist policies in a bid to escape this trap. The country does seem to be moving in this direction. In May, to facilitate marriage, China allowed couples to wed anywhere in the country, as opposed to their place of residence. So far, it seems to be working: the policy change immediately produced a 22.5% year-on-year increase in marriages in the third quarter of 2025.

But this positive effect will be short-lived. Consider what happened when China introduced a mandatory “cooling-off” period for divorcing couples in 2021: divorces fell from 4.34 million in 2020 to 2.84 million in 2021, but then climbed back to 3.51 million in 2024, with a further 6% year-on-year increase in the first three quarters of 2025. After a brief rebound, marriages will resume their downward path, owing to the steady decline in China’s childbearing-age population and the persistent oversupply of men.

Moreover, China recently introduced an annual childcare subsidy of CN¥3,600 ($500) for each child under three. But other countries’ experience suggests that these payments are unlikely to have a significant impact. Despite offering far more generous subsidies, Japan has not managed to halt, let alone reverse, its declining fertility rate.

Concerns are growing that China might turn to coercive measures if these incentives prove ineffective. But this fear is almost surely misplaced. While governments can reduce births by mandating sterilization and abortion, they cannot compel people to marry, become pregnant, or undergo fertility treatment.

Trying to force women to have more babies would inevitably lead to more abandoned children, who would then fall under government care, possibly for decades. Given that heavily indebted local governments lack the financial resources to encourage childbirth, they can hardly afford to assume responsibility for a growing number of abandoned children.

Over the course of the one-child policy, contraception became a necessity, and contraceptives were tax-exempt. China is now among the countries with the highest use. Starting January 1, 2026, contraceptive products such as condoms will be removed from the list of tax-exempt goods and services. With demand so persistent, any effort to prohibit contraception would trigger a public backlash.

Similarly, while the Chinese government has called for a reduction in the number of “medically unnecessary” abortions, it is unlikely to ban the procedure outright (or even restrict access as severely as some jurisdictions in the United States). Decades of atheistic indoctrination under the Communist Party of China, coupled with the widespread use of abortion as an (at times coercive) instrument of population control, have made the Chinese public the world’s most accepting of the procedure. Even in 2020, four years after the Chinese authorities abandoned the one-child policy, 43% of pregnancies were terminated.

Not only would an abortion ban meet intense resistance. It would also be futile, driving the practice underground. During the 36 years of the one-child policy, many physicians were trained in abortion care – so much so that even township clinics offer the procedure. And while the Chinese government has always prohibited sex-selective abortion, the country has long maintained a large male-to-female imbalance at birth, up to 120 boys per 100 girls, indicating that illegal abortions are widespread.

Although coercive pronatalist measures are unlikely to be enacted at the national level, some local governments – particularly in Shandong province, which is notorious for overzealous policy enforcement – may resort to them. For example, in response to the 1991 “one-vote veto” policy, some counties in Shandong launched a campaign to go “newborn-free in 100 days.” In the 2000 census the national population of children aged 5-9 was 72% the size of the cohort aged 10-14, but that ratio was drastically lower in Shandong, at 47%, with the province’s Dongping, Ningyang, and Feicheng counties recording rates of 25%, 23%, and 19%, respectively.

But this time around, Shandong’s efforts may be limited to reporting inflated birth numbers. It wouldn’t be the first time the province has fudged demographic data. After China implemented a selective two-child policy in 2013, Shandong reported one-quarter of all second-child applications nationwide, despite accounting for only 7% of the country’s total population. But these applications did not result in live babies: Shandong’s births fell by 11% in 2015.

Likewise, after the Chinese government implemented the universal two-child policy in January 2016, the resulting birth peak was not expected until the fourth quarter. Yet Shandong’s reported births skyrocketed from 1.23 million in 2015 to 1.77 million in 2016, an increase of 535,000 that accounted for 41% of China’s total rise. This is difficult to reconcile with the 5% decline in the province’s primary school enrollments in 2022, the year these children should have started school.

China’s pronatalist policies may trigger a temporary rebound in births. But it seems likely that many of these children will exist only on statistical ledgers, much like the “dead souls” in Nikolai Gogol’s eponymous novel.

Yi Fuxian, a senior scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, spearheaded the movement against China’s one-child policy and is the author of Big Country with an Empty Nest (China Development Press, 2013), which went from being banned in China to ranking first in China Publishing Today’s 100 Best Books of 2013 in China.

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