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Some areas of China have indicated a greater willingness to have more children, contrary to national trends. Photo: Future Publishing via Getty Images
China population: province bucks trend with surveyed interest in bigger families
- Survey of families across the southern province of Guangdong show a higher interest in more children
- News comes as predictions for national birth rates continue to sour, country records multi-decade lows
Luna Sun in Beijing
Published: 8:00am, 18 Oct, 2023
Families from Guangdong province, China’s manufacturing hub in the south, are bucking national trends and indicating a growing interest in having two or more children – welcome news amid growing concern for the country’s deepening demographic crisis and an increasingly normalised population decline.
According to a survey conducted in mid-June by the Guangdong Academy of Population Development, a government think tank, more than half of respondents said they would like to have two children, while an additional 6.5 per cent said they wanted to have three or more. The results were publicised this week.
More than 85 per cent of the 13,039 respondents from five cities – Guangzhou, Jiangmen, Jieyang, Shaoguan and Maoming – said they would like to have at least one child.
But on a nationwide basis both the absolute number and the share of second-born children dropped in 2022, indicating a fading effect for policies designed to incentivise higher birth rates.
The number of babies born second or later in Chinese families last year accounted for 53.9 per cent of all newborns, down from 55.9 per cent in 2021, the National Health Commission said last week.
The total number of children born second or later also declined, part of China’s first population decrease in six decades as deaths outnumbered births and total headcount plummeted by 850,000 to 1.4118 billion in 2022, down from 1.4126 billion a year earlier.
China also recorded the lowest birth count in its modern history with 9.56 million, the first time the figure dipped below 10 million.
Demographers have predicted births could further drop to between 7 million and 8 million this year, setting a record low and further clouding the country’s demographic outlook.
A raft of pronatalist policies has been rolled out at local and central levels, but experts have conceded that immediate effects are unlikely and China must adapt to the “new normal”.
Guangdong is the wealthiest and the most populous province in the country, and last year it saw its population decline for the first time in more than four decades.
The southern province said its resident population – people living in the region for more than six months – fell by 272,000 from a year earlier to 126.57 million.
However, it did record 1.05 million newborns in 2022, making it the only province to log more than 1 million births.
According to the survey, younger respondents in Guangdong showed greater reluctance to start a family. More than 30 per cent of respondents born after 2000 said they had no intention of having children.
Of those without procreation plans, more than 70 per cent said the financial cost was the main reason.
Others said the attendant workload, lack of a caretaker, or hindrances to careers were also contributing factors. Each was mentioned by about 40 per cent of those surveyed.
The results may be looked at carefully as plans are made to arrest the decline. Local experts have made suggestions for policies to reduce the financial burden on expanding families, including personal income tax cuts and affordable day care.
