this post was submitted on 29 Dec 2025
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How is life in China actually? There must be a reason people don't want children. I imagine work culture, bad pay, bad prospects, and inability to secure housing are top among the reasons.
Yeah, kids cry and shit a lot. You don't need a reason not to want them, you need a reason to have them.
They also take up all your goddamn time with storytime and cuddles and teaching them how to ride a bike or type their name out on a keyboard or playing lego or making crafts or going on adventures or eating cheese
And doctor appointments, and driving them to school and from school and standing next to them watching them stand there not doing anything just in case the fall down and hit their head on the floor and cooking 3 different breakfasts for them because they changed their mind 3 times and so on and so on. Yeah, it's very rewarding for some, not that appealing for others.
NYT put out a video 3 weeks ago covering a few guys that couldn't get women. The video says there's 30 million more men than women in the country due to the one child policy.
But that figure could be inflated
Not that I am disagreeing with your assessment, but I think low child brith rate is pretty universal in developed country.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_fertility_rate
Yes, education is a big factor in reduced birth rate, but I doubt it's the biggest factor. If educated people lived in societies with good conditions for raising and bearing children, I imagine they would make the informed decision to get children.
It would take more than financial incentives I suspect. It's the time cost that is so demanding and it would likely require a restructuring of society that either results in people working much less hours, or a more community-based child rearing approach.
None of those reasons are why I decided not to have children. My reason is: my wife and I like to play computer 8 hours per day when we got home from work.
I believe China has too much housing right now. But the rest seems to be reason enough.
People who leave and get citizenship elsewhere are never allowed to return. It's a single party dictatorship with no sign of civil rights, some minorities are actively being sterilized and eradicated.
If you're a wealthy Han Chinese then I bet it's great.
Don’t get carried away. The reason is the opposite of what you think.
Their birth rates dropped dramatically because they raised so many people out of poverty with socialism. But now capitalism demands that they generate more workers.
Pretty deep irony, because very recently they weren’t allowed to have more than one child.
They actually had massive overpopulation after industrialization and then limited it with the One Child Policy, then later the Two Child Policy, but one of the repercussions of the One Child Policy and the inability of women to inherit wealth was that female babies were murdered at birth and a large gender ratio disparity formed. Now that the population has started to decline while average lifespan rises due to improved medical science, two new problems have formed:
The ratio of elderly to young is skewed, meaning one young has to take care of more elderly or do their equivalent of work.
The dictatorship's most recent leader has realized he personally benefits from more manpower regardless of the consequences and suffering that increased population will cause.
You’re correct. It’s an oversimplification…but not a big one.
Cold hard predicative and replicable facts are better than “it must suck in China so they don’t want kids, bro”
It's a massive oversimplification that seems to whitewash China's policies.
Every country that undergoes industrialisation and urbanisation has a big drop in birth rates. Same in capitalist and socialist countries, there's no essential difference in how it plays out (the tempo is different from case to case for many reasons, but the trend is the same). But China additionally made the rates plummet through govt intervention.
So you stressed and praised the part that wasn't truly crucial for the outcome (socialism), but ignored the part (one child policy) that drastically contributed to the outcome and that can't be presented as nice or intuitively desirable (regardless of whether it objectively was or wasn't a good decision). That's not simplification but selectiveness.
(Yes, it is true that many lemmings who live outside China just project their own "China sucks" logic onto the Chinese, and their approach is wrong, I agree with you on that count.)
Yes…because those things create wealth. Sounds like you agree but are trying to find an argument. We know birth rate and wealth/poverty are directly related…it’s is what it is. Once upon a time it was just understood that was the case…before everybody injected personal politics into everything.
For the purposes of my comment I’m ambivalent about the political “vehicle”…I’m just plainly stating what happened: social policy raised billions out of poverty….then the capitalist elements of the society demanded labour. We know it’s not the other way around. If you think I’m assigning value to either capitalism or socialism, you’re projecting.
Meh…what, in your headcanon, am I “selecting” for? I don’t even know if you got “offended” about socialism or capitalism, I don’t want to debate something I didn’t say.