I'm Ruby Jones and you're listening to seven AM. Condoms and other contraceptives are set to become more expensive in China as the Communist Party tries to boost population growth. With the economy slowing, birth rates declining, and for population aging, the government is now trying all kinds of ways to make women have more babies, from taxing contraception to new
laws on marriages, to cash bonuses and propaganda campaigns. Reproduction is now seen as a national security issue, and the success or failure of the new policies will have far reaching consequences for China's economic and military strength and for countries like Australia who rely on China continuing to grow. Today seeing an analysts at the Makata Institute for China Studies Daria in Biombardo on the threat to women's autonomy in
China's new phase of population control. It's Friday, December twelfth.
Now. Despite government leaders stressing that things are looking up, Chinese economic growth has recently faltered. For a long term boost, state and party leader Sijiping is relying on domestic consumption. However, there is a problem. China's population is aging.
So Daria in China. Right now, we've got a population who are getting older. At the same time the birth rate is slowing down dramatically. So what does it mean for China to have those two factors at play.
Well, you know, the population is not only getting old, but it's also shrinking. So China has been classified as an aged society according to you know you and parameters, which means that more than fourteen percent of the population is now above the age of sixty five. And so that means that eventually also the workforce will start shrinking, and that's a problem for China's economic prospects.
A plummeting population rate could threatn economic growth. The current situation is a major concern for the authority.
It's definitely a domestic economic concern, but it also you know, impacts China's international ambitions as a global superpower. So it's something that has reverberations across all sectors of society.
And I suppose tell me a bit more about what it kind of looks like when those things happen, Like, what is the kind of demographic situation.
Well, you obviously have a lot of people entering retirement age and sort of requiring support from the state. Now we don't hear about this very much, but in the sort of local governments in China, the finances are actually pretty tight. A lot of local governments are in debt, so the situation is already quite die, especially when it
comes to pensions. The pension fund's risk running out very soon, and then once the labor force starts shrinking, it means that there will be less people paying tax.
Okay, can we take a step back and talk about how China got here? Because I think a lot of the time when we think about China and we think about children, we obviously think about the one child policy, which dates back to the eighties. For the next thirty years, at least, all couples may only have one single child each. The Chinese have been very swift in implementing this policy throughout China. So how has that affected the population and what we're seeing today?
So the birth rate had already started shrinking before the one to hold policy was sort of enforced. But then for you know, more than thirty years, we had these extremely corrosive measures that were imposed on families and especially women. Financial finds and a lot of surveillance across society, but also often forced abortions, forced serilizations, which was very traumatic for women, and a lot of those women have very
fresh memories. And so now you've kind of experienced this one eighty from the authorities not trying to push for more birds. The restrictions have never gone away, it's just that now the ideal family is one with two or three children.
Okay, So how has that affected the way that women think about families and motherhood.
Well, I think that it's not just the one child policy that has influenced this, but the number of marriages every year continues to deep like it's basically never been this slow. We have a much much larger section of people with higher education. You know, the vast majority of young women these days are very highly educated. They're probably located in urban centers, and so the standards of living
have changed. People have different expectations from their life now, and there is this sense that having a child will severely impact your standard of living, especially for a young urban couple, because having children in China's become so expensive. By some estimates, it's actually more expensive to raise a child in China than it is in the US or in Japan right now, and especially things like the cost of education. So you know, it's so many factors that
play into this decision. Organizations like national family planning organizations or the Women's Federation, they basically want to make it cheaper for young people to get married, so they offer the opportunity to just get married on mass and all expenses covered, and they also receive a patriotic marriage badge from the authorities. But you're probably only going to convince people who wanted to get married in the first place,
didn't have the money to do so. I don't think that's convincing anyone who didn't want to get married in the first place.
Coming up, the government's not just trying to encourage women to have children, it's trying to coerce them. While this is happening, while attitudes towards marriage and motherhood are changing, particularly among young people in China, there is this coordinated national push by the Chinese Communist Party to try and reverse that. So tell me a bit more about what that actually looks like what we're hearing from President she and the campaigns that are underway.
We will implement policies to stimulate the birth rate, and we will lead a national strategy to find solutions to our aging population.
So Sudinping is framing childbirths within the context of national rejuvenation, you know, and that the message is obviously that having children is not just a personal choice, but you know, it has to be a contribution to the country. It's for the future security of the country. And so officials are told or like directed to guide people first to marry because childbirths outside of wetlock is still frowned upon, but also to have children at a proper age, so
called proper age. So you have this kind of sharing of pseudo scientific theories around motherhood and how motherhood is healthier for women, or that you know, at some point is actually great if you could study and have children at the same time, which is the complete opposite of what authorities were saying up until ten years ago. Do you see these campaign celebrating mothers and messages about family duties,
especially for women. So that kind of narrative around women's rights in general quality has turned back again to traditional confusion values of women's primary role or as caregivers. There is a small effort to get men to contribute a bit more to household duties and then care duties it's probably short sighted. It will take a long time for that to change, especially when women are still the ones who have to sacrifice their careers and that's something that happens as soon as they have a child.
Okay, So there's this attempt to try and change the way that people think about marriage, right, but there's also there's some I guess more heavy handed approaches at play as well. Out then new laws, new policies tell me about those.
Yeah, So at the moment, there's this combination of support and pressure on paper. The government is trying to expand child care services, to offer subsidies. Actually this year, for the first time, we had a national level cash subsidy introduced, and so the support is kind of being announced and it's there in some places, but not everywhere. And so at some point you need to pair this support with more coercive measures, and you know, you start, for example,
having tighten access to abortion or contraception. There is a push to decrease the number of abortions in China because it's still the country with the highest number of abortions globally. But then you know, they do things like taking contraceptives of the tax exempt item lists, so it's likely that next year the cost of condoms and things like that is going to increase.
Yeah, I wanted to ask about that because some of these measures do seem quite punitive and coercive. So how are people responding to having the state intervene in this way?
I would say mostly with skepticism. It's obviously, especially among young people and women, there is a sense that actually the party is not interested in solving the basic structural issues that they're facing, like high living costs or long working hours, or these issues with gender equality, but simply just trying to pressure them more. And this can easily backfire. What a lot of women are saying is that they're
not convinced. They still don't want to get married, and they still don't want to have children.
And you said that this is really for the CECP at least about the security of the country. So what you know, what happens. I suppose if this attempt to get people to have families, to get married, to have more children, if that doesn't work, how concerned is the CECP about that.
I think the CCP and the leadership more broadly are quite worried because they have seen this play out already. In other countries, and this trend of population and shrinking is almost irreversible. I mean, once it starts happening, it's really really hard to turn around. So, you know, China's sort of development is funded on this sustained you know, economic growth, and that risks being impacted by this demographic shift.
So I think that the ambitions that Sidinping has for China's a global superpower are looking more shaky from a domestic perspective when looking at this issue in particular, and what about.
What it means for women in China more broadly. I mean for it to be more difficult for you to get contraception or get an abortion. I mean, these are significant things that impact women's life. So how do you think about the future for women when they're kind of in this situation?
There are really worrying trends. One of the things that I mentioned in the report is even a court case that happened a year and a half ago, I believe, And in that court case, specifically, the judge rule that a woman had infringed on her husband's reproductive rights because
she had an abortion without his consent. And you know, the domestic violence rates in China are still very high, and this is just quite concerning on so many levels, like it could impact even women's education prospects and definitely
women's labor rights. I mean, even if the government can promise that they will give more paternity leaves so that fathers also can look after children, companies are not really doing that right now, and there's not enough subsidies for private companies to do that, and so it is worrying
what's happening in China. But I also see it as a bit of a global trend, you know, where you see this focus on women's rights and gender equality retreat, there are similar narratives across Europe and the United States of returning to traditional family values and especially restricting women's autonomy.
Well, Daria, thank you so much for your time, Thank you so much. Also in the news, Anthony Alberenzi has defended his government's use of expenses, saying the rules are set at arm's length from government. The Prime Minister and Communications Minister Anika Wells have been repeatedly asked about her spending while the pair are out trying to promote the new social media band for teenagers, which went into effect on Wednesday. When he was asked if the rules should
be changed, Mister Abenezi said he's not. The Finance Minister and property developers in Queensland are set to be able to make political donates again as the state government introduces new legislation to lift a ban.
The practice was.
Outlawed in twenty eighteen by the former Queensland Labor government after the Crime and Corruption Commission recommended that local councils should not be able to receive money from developers, and they expanded it to include state candidates. Debate on the legislation will begin when Parliament resumes in the new year. I'm Ruby Jones. This is seven am. Thanks for listening.