Dragons have long been associated with emperors and are a symbol of power, intelligence and success, and children born in the Year of the Dragon are believed to have these traits. This belief is likely to drive a surge in births in China in 2024, according to the South China Morning Post .
"Main cause"
However, citing China's annual census data, demographer Fuxian Yi of the University of Wisconsin-Madison (USA) said that the Year of the Dragon had little effect on birth rates in China until at least 2010," according to Newsweek .
In 2000, (the year of the Dragon), China recorded a birth rate of 1.22 births per 1,000 women, down 0.23 from the year of the Cat 1999 and 0.17 lower than the year of the Snake 2001.
Meanwhile, small spikes of at least 0.5 births per 1,000 women were recorded in 2000 in Hong Kong as well as in Taiwan and South Korea.
China saw a modest 0.22 increase in its birth rate in 2012 (Year of the Dragon), according to Mr. Yi's database, with Taiwan, Hong Kong, South Korea and Singapore's ethnic Chinese populations also seeing small increases.
Dragon dance at a festival in China
Newsweek Screenshot
In China, marriage is “strongly correlated with having a baby the following year,” said Yi. The number of marriages rose 4.5% in the first three quarters of 2023 after the government abandoned its strict zero-Covid-19 policy in January.
Chinese authorities expect as many as 9.3 million births in 2024, up from 9.02 million last year. But if the birth rate rises, it will be more due to the end of anti-virus measures during the pandemic than the Year of the Dragon, Yi said.
Despite the efforts of the Chinese government?
China's population shrank by 2.08 million last year, more than double the decline in 2022, despite government efforts to encourage child-rearing to rescue the country's aging workforce, data released by the country's statistics bureau showed on January 17.
In recent years, China has introduced policies to encourage childbearing and support families. The Chinese government abolished its decades-long one-child policy in 2016. At the same time, provincial and city governments have provided modest cash subsidies to parents of newborns.
Chinese President Xi Jinping last year called on the country to "actively promote a new culture of marriage and childbirth, and strengthen guidance on young people's views on marriage".
China's birth rate has fallen for two consecutive years.
Captured from Newsweek clip
However, these initiatives seem to come too little, too late amid changing attitudes among China's younger generation, who often see the rising cost of living in big cities as an obstacle to family planning, according to Newsweek .
A study published last year in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health found that 37% of Chinese women living in urban areas intended to have a maximum of two children. However, the rate dropped to just 29% in increasingly expensive first-tier cities such as Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen.
Yang Fan, a population researcher at Renmin University of China, recently told China Daily that the United States and some parts of Europe have been experiencing a trend of later marriages and fewer births for many years. Yang believes that Chinese society is now reaching this stage and describes population decline as inevitable.
Source link
Comment (0)