China’s Low Fertility: Evidence from the 2010 Census

Abstract

This chapter addressed the patterns of China’s current fertility using data drawn mainly from the 2010 population census. In spite of some remaining uncertainty concerning their accuracy, it appears that all the recent available sources of data nonetheless converge to indicate that China’s fertility dropped below replacement level in the early 1990s, and continued to decline in the 2000s. These converging data therefore challenge the official TFR of 1.8 children per women, regularly used as a reference by Chinese officials.

Conclusion

This chapter addressed the patterns of China’s current fertility using data drawn mainly from the 2010 population census. In spite of some remaining uncertainty concerning their accuracy, it appears that all the recent available sources of data nonetheless converge to indicate that China’s fertility dropped below replacement level in the early 1990s, and continued to decline in the 2000s. These converging data therefore challenge the official TFR of 1.8 children per woman, regularly used as a reference by Chinese officials.

However, such low fertility is quite plausible in China’s current socioeconomic context, where the cost of raising children is increasingly high (in particular for education and health) and where young couples now prefer to have very few children so that they can offer them the best start in life (Attané 2011). But it is also supported by various cultural traits of Chinese society, also seen in some neighbouring populations such as Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan, where fertility decline was facilitated by a willingness to postpone marriage and “a receptivity to the voluntary limitation of higher-order births” associated with Confucian culture (Coale and Freedman 1993, p. 238). In today’s China as in many other countries in the world, especially in Asia (Bongaarts 2001; Bongaarts 2002), various socioeconomic factors are obviously conducive to reducing fertility (Guo 2008; Guo 2010b; Morgan et al. 2009; Cai 2010). So it appears that the fertility desires of women of childbearing age have become much weaker after four decades of family planning policy (Zheng et al. 2009). The last two surveys conducted in 2001 and 2006 by the National Population and Family Planning Commission, for instance, indicate that the average ideal number of children for women of childbearing age is quite low, at about 1.7, a level even below that observed in many developed countries. This process of fertility decline is associated with an increasing tendency towards delayed childbearing in recent years. There is therefore a significant postponement effect on fertility, which is also widespread in other low-fertility populations and tends to reduce the TFR. Indeed, the Bongaarts and Feeney method (1998) applied to Chinese data indicates that the postponement effect reduced the annual TFR by about 0.2 points on average during the years 1995–2005 (Zhao and Guo 2010). Among other factors, the postponement of childbearing is made possible by the exceptionally high prevalence of contraceptive use in China (see Inset 2.3 and Table 2.5), especially the use of “long-term” methods that significantly reduce the risk of unwanted pregnancies.

To some extent, the traditional preference for sons—theoretically conducive to increased overall fertility, with couples giving birth to an additional child until they reach the ideal sex composition of their descent – and in particular the methods used to achieve this preference (namely, sex-selective abortion), unexpectedly plays in favour of a low fertility. As couples frequently resort to abortion to combine their sex-composition constraint with a family size constraint imposed by the family planning policy, this also tends to reduce the overall number of births and therefore the fertility level.

Inset 2.3 Contraceptive Use and Reproductive Health

Contraceptive use is part of the broader concept of reproductive health, in that it limits the number of pregnancies, and thus is expected to improve women’s health. In China, contraceptive use is a legal obligation among couples of reproductive age, and only those who have permission to conceive a child are exempted. As a consequence, the contraceptive prevalence rate has reached exceptionally high levels, even higher than those observed in the most developed countries. In 1982, 70 % of married women of reproductive age were using contraception, and this proportion reached almost 90 % in 2008.

In theory, almost all existing contraception methods are available to Chinese couples. In practice, however, the intra-uterine device (IUD) (qigong nei jieyu) and female sterilization by tubal ligation (shuluanguan jieza), which are provided or performed free of charge in family planning centres or in hospitals after delivery, are overwhelmingly used. In fact, the wide prevalence of these so-called “long-term” methods (i.e. IUD and female sterilization) has long been part of a deliberate attempt by the government to generalize the most effective methods, whose use can be easily imposed and controlled (a woman can stop taking the pill without the consent of family planning cadres, while she cannot reverse sterilization or, in principle, remove the IUD without consulting a doctor) to meet the requirements of the birth control policy.

Couples using one of the so-called “short-efficiency” contraceptive methods (duan xiao), such as the pill or condoms, are therefore a small minority, representing less than 10 % of the total number of users in 2008. Sterilization (male or female) and IUD are therefore the most widely used methods: 37 % and 53 % respectively in 2008, with the latter gradually gaining ground over other methods.

I.A.

There is no doubt that the rapid social transformations taking place in China, along with the economic reforms, have changed individual behaviour in a direction that tends to reduce fertility (Cai 2010). Although most young Chinese persist in the belief that once they reach adulthood, men and women must marry and raise children, new ways of life are emerging and individualism is gaining ground, with a necessary impact on attitudes toward marriage and childbearing (Attané 2011). One aspect of these rapid social transformations conducive to low fertility is mass internal migration (with an estimated 220 million migrants in 2010, i.e. more than 15 % of the total population), and the inherent urbanization process, both analysed later in this book. In fact, as stated above, a number of studies (Chen 2005; Chen and Wu 2006; Guo 2010a) suggest that rural migrants in cities tend to marry and give birth at later ages than their rural non-migrant counterparts, and therefore contribute to lower overall fertility.

In many respects, the official line whereby China has a total fertility rate of 1.8 children per woman becomes difficult to defend when considering the potential influence on fertility of the above-mentioned characteristics, although their impact is difficult to quantify.