Welcome to Foreign Policy’s China Brief.

It’s Golden Week, China’s fall national holiday period, so as the Chinese public heads to Southeast Asia for vacation or simply enjoys a break from work, we’re doing one of our periodic deep dives.

Welcome to Foreign Policy’s China Brief.

It’s Golden Week, China’s fall national holiday period, so as the Chinese public heads to Southeast Asia for vacation or simply enjoys a break from work, we’re doing one of our periodic deep dives.

This week, we’re talking about childbirth in China—and how social stress and family pressures contribute to one of the world’s lowest birth rates.

The Realities of Having a Child in China

Fertility almost always declines as countries get richer, but China has seen one of the sharpest drops of any nation, especially since 2017.

It’s a credit to public stubbornness that during many of the one-child policy years, from 1979 to 2015, the average Chinese couple had close to two kids anyway. Now that the government wants them to have two, the average couple has only one. It was a shock to officials that loosening the policy to two children in 2015 and then to three in 2021 produced no uptick in births.

Commentary tends to focus on cost: China is the second-most expensive place in the world to raise a child. The biggest expenses come later, when education costs soar. The government tried to solve this problem by banning private K-12 tutoring in 2021, but........

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