China Offering Free Fertility Treatments To Boost Low Birth Rates
Daily CallerNov 29, 2022
The Facts
Amid concerns over declining birth rates and marriage registrations, officials in eastern China’s Changshan County are offering a 1K-yuan ($137) reward to young married couples if the bride is 25 years old or younger.
The county, located in the eastern province of Zhejiang, announced the policy on its official WeChat account. It stipulated that the reward only applies to couples marrying for the first time and is intended to promote "age-appropriate marriage and childbearing."
The Spin
Anti-China narrative
China created its current demographic disaster with its failed family policies over the last four decades and is now overcompensating for its mistakes. For nearly 40 years China forced a birth rate that was half of the replacement level, yet Chinese officials seem to be caught off guard that decades later the PRC has an aging population and low birth rates. China is nearing catastrophe as its demographic pyramid becomes inverted. China did too little, too late to avoid this crisis.
Pro-China narrative
While all of the focus is on China’s rise in the last 40 years, many are ignoring China’s history of vast population fluctuation. Any civilization that is thousands of years old will have times of population growth and decline. China still has more than a billion people, and it will endure strongly regardless of whether the birth rate ticks up a bit or not in short-term cycles.