China’s state-run Global Times on Monday reported that 25 provincial authorities are set to begin distributing “maternity allowances” to women on November 1.
In other words, having exhausted every other strategy to combat demographic decline, China will start paying women to have babies.
“Since September, provinces such as Jiangxi, Anhui and Shaanxi have successively rolled out direct payments of maternity allowances to individuals province-wide,” the Global Times noted.
The expanded program scheduled to roll out on November 1 will cover “nearly 90 percent of all social insurance pooling areas of the country.” A few notable exceptions include Beijing, the tech hub of Guangdong, and the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR).
China’s National Healthcare Security Administration (NHSA) said the direct subsidies for childbirth, intended to cover “living expenses paid to female employees during maternity leave,” would bring China one step closer to becoming a “childbirth-friendly society.”
China has already implemented several programs to reduce the cost of maternity and child-rearing, but until now, the subsidies were generally paid to employers rather than directly distributed to the beneficiaries.
Demography experts told the Global Times that routing the subsidies through employers invited “deductions, delays or misuse,” including employers deciding to keep some of the subsidy money to offset the cost of paid maternity leave. Also, using employers to distribute the subsidies raised the apparent cost of hiring female employees, and the indirect system did little to benefit “flexible workers” such as ride-hailing drivers, food delivery workers, and freelancers.
On the other hand, some of the direct subsidy money will only be available to women who paid money into the system through paycheck deductions – in fact, the NHSA is boasting that little paperwork is required to claim benefits beyond proof that the recipient made payments to finance the system – and the subsidies “remain relatively low compared with the costs of childbirth, childcare, and education.”
Louise Loo, head of Asia research for Oxford Economics, glumly noted to the Washington Post on October 11 that it is “almost impossible to reverse a demographic decline,” even for an authoritarian regime like China with fairly deep pockets.
China’s brutal “One Child Policy” of population control left the next generation short of fertile women, since couples wanted boys more than girls. The Chinese Communist regime seemed surprised that it could not simply order its population to start having more children when demographic decline became apparent. Numerous big-money programs to increase fertility have failed to produce adequate results, as in other declining countries that attempted similar programs, like Japan and South Korea.
“The Chinese government is now throwing money at the problem, but it may come as too little, too late. Last month, Beijing unveiled a new subsidy of about $500 a year for the first three years of a child’s life. On social media, some commentators noted they would consider having more children if the subsidy were 10 times what’s being offered,” the Washington Post noted.
Fewer children, coupled with longer lifespans and higher costs for supporting retirees, is creating a demographic crisis in almost every industrialized nation, but China’s hangover from the One Child Policy is making it worse. Loo’s calculations said China could lose half a percent from its GDP growth over the coming decade due to population decline.
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