COVID-19 certainly has had a major impact on nearly every aspect of social life, let alone pregnancy. The yearbook mentioned in the former part highlighted the pandemic as a major concern in China's population study. It points out that the outbreak of the epidemic in early 2020 inhibited people's family planning, resulting in a sharp decline in the birth population at the end of the year 2020.

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However, it is notable that birth rate decline began far earlier than 2020. And there does exist deeply rooted problems behind the decreasing figures:

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Financial burdens serve as the most evident and dominating factor that contributes to the decline. Among our questionnaire responses, one man working in Beijing underlined that, in China, especially in first-tier cities, there’s no upper limit on the cost of children’s education.

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The point is more about helping kids to excel in exams which land them on a path to a better life than educating them to be better men. So, when parents devoted both themselves and their children to a competition of academic performance, they resort to online and offline education services which is exorbitant.

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Check out tables on the left for costs other than education-related ones. Can’t imagine how hard parents have to work in order to reach the “default settings” of raising a kid in these cities.

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The incompatibility between conservative gender norms and women’s rising economic status accounts for another reason behind the decline. With more women receiving higher education, entering traditionally male-dominated industries, and getting well-paid jobs, they gain increasing negotiation power due to a rise in economic status.

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However, here’s the other side of the picture: women are at the risk of losing job or at least the opportunities of getting promoted during pregnancy and childbearing, due to the existing mainstream ideas that women are naturally family-oriented and ready to reconcile with the responsibility of child caring, whereas men’s priorities are undisputedly personal ambitions and free choices.

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Although legislation reform could bring punishment to gender prejudices at workplaces, toxic norms need time to disappear. If getting married and having kids threaten women’s competitiveness at workplaces and slow them down towards self-actualization, certainly fewer women would choose to do so.

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Despite the two problems that are structural and hard to be fixed immediately, the government seeks to halt the decline in birth rate with policy change.