their young ones are too busy to pair up

“Energy is limited, so I have to eliminate the things that drain me the most. And first thing? Dating.” The phrase is from Owen Cao, a 22-year-old Chinese man who spends his days making bobbin lace to meet the obligations of his first postgraduate course, study sessions, homework, student club activities and hobbies. An enormous load of obligations that is difficult to compress into weeks of seven days and 24 hours. Hence, I recently recognized South China Morning Postdispense with what is a priori more accessory: romances and fatherhood, the latter directly erased from the equation.

Cao’s opinions would not have greater relevance if it were not for the fact that, in a way, they summarize one of the great challenges that Beijing faces if it wants to reverse its birth rate crisis.

Days of only 24 hours. “Many people say that you have to manage your time well, but honestly, no matter how well you plan, it is impossible to cover everything,” continues Cao, an ocean engineering student. Hence, the impossibility of fitting more responsibilities into days of only 24 hours, which at least today rules out getting involved in a stable relationship.

Yours is not a unique case. When interviewing him, SCMP He said that his three roommates thought exactly the same as him. In fact, their mentality is linked to a much larger (and growing) trend in China: the reluctance to look for a partner among young people.

From testimony to figures. Testimonies like Cao’s help to better understand the changes in Chinese society, but they are not the only clue. Surveys allow us to go further, broaden the focus and understand its scope. A year ago The Guardian echoed one that reflected that two thirds of the more than 20,000 people interviewed, mostly urban women between 18 and 25 years old, confessed to having a “low desire” to become mothers.

In 2021 the newspaper China Youth Daily conducted another survey among 14,000 university students that showed that almost 70% were single, a figure that for some experts could be even higher now due to the hangover of the “Covid Zero” policy. Statista directly estimates that 69% of young people between 26 and 22 years old fit that profile in 2021, a percentage that shot up to 79% among those born between 2000 and 2003. When the Faculty of Public Administration at Zhongnan University consulted his students, he discovered that about 57% say they are not interested in dating, at least today.

A “single society”? With such figures on the table, there are experts who are already openly wondering if China is evolving towards a “single society.” The truth is that the data on marriages and births (both closely linked in traditional Chinese society and culture) are of sufficient concern in Beijing for Xi Jinping to have activated a package of measures that includes economic aid, tax advantages, health coverage or even teaching “marriage and love education courses” at colleges. All with one goal: for young people to couple and have children.

Proof that the first is as important as the second for the Chinese authorities is that there are administrations already offering a kind of ‘pro wedding checks’. It was revealed two months ago by Global Times, linked to the ruling party People´s Dailyin an article that explained how Lüliang authorities were considering rewarding couples getting married for the first time with 1,500 yuan (about $214). Of course, they must meet a fundamental requirement to qualify for aid: not be over 35 years old.

Good ideas, bad data. Despite this effort both to encourage marriages and, above all, to encourage births, China is not achieving great results. While waiting for the global data for 2024 to be published, the quarterly statistics show a “pinch” in both sections: marriages and births.

Between January and September, 4.75 million couples got married in the country, 16.6% less than in 2023, and the trend is not encouraging. If we look specifically at the third quarter of the year, the decrease is more pronounced, more than 25%, with the balance of links that period being the lowest since 2008. The marriage data is far from the peak of 2013, when the 13 million new links, and there are experts who believe that in 2024 they may have fallen below the historical minimum of 2022.

Birth rates are not buoyant either. The United Nations or World Bank tables reveal that the Chinese birth rate has been on a clearly downward curve for some time now, which led it to lose almost 2.1 million inhabitants in 2023. Its birth rate was also bad, accentuating the population loss that had already been recorded in 2022 and marking its worst result since records began.

Why don’t young people get married and have children? Good question. Difficult answer. It comes with reviewing the local and international press to verify two things: the first is that the authorities and experts have been thinking about it for some time; The second is that the only way to approach it is with a broad perspective that encompasses the Chinese economy, culture, society and politics. Issues such as the costs of parenting, economic uncertainty and poor job prospects, the effects of the pandemic or cultural changes come into play.

The new Chinese scenario comes after decades of “one-child policy”, applied until 2015. Zhen Yexin, an expert in demography, provides an interesting fact in Sixth Tones: among the rural population aged 20 to 49 with primary education or less there are 474 .5 single men for every 100 single women. The picture would be totally different in the single urban population between 35 and 49 years old with high education (university or higher). In that case there would be almost parity: 97.7 men for every hundred women.

“I wasn’t that stressed out”. There is another key and it is what emerges from Cao’s statements: among young Chinese there are those who do without partners and the idea of ​​parenthood because they simply do not have time. Neither for one nor for the other. Faced with complex job prospects and increasingly more academic and professional ambitions, students focus on obtaining recommendations and good grades for their postgraduate studies.

“They barely have time to rest and much less energy to think about dates,” he confesses to SCMP Wu Ruoshi, 28, who remembers that not so long ago, when he was attending university just a decade ago, he had enough free time to date without his academic performance suffering.

“At that time I didn’t stress so much about everything,” the young woman remembers. “When I was in college, I felt like I had a lot of free time and didn’t consider dating to have any impact on my studies.” Although it wasn’t that long ago, things are different now, Cao says. He and other young people in the same situation feel the pressure to achieve good postgraduate degrees. Added to this is a greater offer of leisure and distractions and a society more open to accepting having children outside of marriage.

“Herd mentality”. “In the past there was a strong herd mentality. Everyone got married, so they did too. People didn’t really think about why they got married,” reflects Yuan Xin, a university professor of demography. “Now young people seem to be waking up and it seems complicated to them.”

The big question is whether the measures designed by Beijing, including its “marriage and love education” courses, will take effect and revive the statistics on marriages and birth rates in the Asian giant, so that the birth rate crisis is much more than a social challenge: it is a huge economic problem.

Imágenes | GT#2…Off permanently (Flickr), Kristoffer Trolle (Flickr) y Our World in Data

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