For decades, China has strictly limited the number of children couples can have, arguing that everyone would be better off with fewer mouths to feed. The government’s one-child policy was woven into the fabric of everyday life, through slogans on street banners and in popular culture and public art.
Now, faced with a shrinking and aging population, China is using the same propaganda channel to send the opposite message: have more children.
The government is also giving financial incentives to couples having two or three children. But the efforts were not successful. China’s birth rate has fallen sharply, and last year was the lowest since the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949.
China’s annual population growth
Source: National Bureau of Statistics of China
Instead of enforcing birth limits, the government has shifted gears to promote a “pro-birth culture,” organizing beauty pageants for pregnant women and producing rap videos about the benefits of having children.
In recent years, the state broadcaster’s annual spring festival gala, one of the nation’s most-watched TV events, has featured public service ads promoting families with two or three children.
In an ad that aired last year, an apparently pregnant woman was shown resting her hand on her stomach while her husband and son slept peacefully in bed. The caption reads: “It’s coming alive around here.
Source: China Central Television
The propaganda effort has been met with great derision. Critics have seen the campaign as just the latest sign that policymakers are blind to the rising costs and other challenges people face in raising multiple children.
They have also scoffed at recent calls for an apparent regulatory whiplash after decades of forcing abortions and restricting births with hefty fines. Between 1980 and 2015, the year the one-child policy officially ended, the Chinese government used extensive propaganda to warn that having more children would hinder China’s modernization.
Today, official statements point to large families as the foundation for achieving a prosperous society, known as “xiaokang” in Chinese.
Sources: “After” photo by Marie Methylene/Getty Images via Roger Violet; “Now” photo courtesy of the local government of Bengbo, Anhui Province
For officials, implementing the one-child policy also meant that they had to challenge the traditional belief that children, and especially sons, provided a form of security in old age. To change that thinking, family planning offices plastered towns and villages with slogans saying the state would take care of old Chinese.
But China’s population is growing rapidly. By 2040, nearly a third of its population will be over 60. The state will be under pressure to support the elderly, especially in rural areas, who receive a fraction of the pensions received by urban salaried workers under the current program.
Now the official message has changed dramatically, emphasizing the importance of self-reliance and family support.
Under the one-child policy, local governments imposed a steep “social upbringing fee” on those who had more children than allowed. For some families, these fines brought financial ruin and broken marriages.
As recently as early 2021, people were still being heavily fined for having a third child, just a few months later, in June, the government passed a law allowing all married couples to have three children. went It has also not only abolished these fees across the country but also encouraged locals to provide additional welfare benefits and longer parental leave for families with three children.
Axis has asked local officials to remove visible remnants of the one-child policy. Last year, local governments in various provinces systematically removed old slogans banning births from public streets and walls.
In a village in northern China’s Shaanxi province, civil servants took to the streets with slogans in support of the one-child policy.
Source: Xilingjing Xiang Local Government, Shanxi Province
But slogans that the government wants to treat as relics of a bygone era are finding new resonance with young Chinese.
On social media, many Chinese users shared images of the one-child policy slogans as they described the growing social pressure for large families. Some posts have received thousands of likes and hundreds of comments.