To combat demographic decline, China is launching ‘love courses’ for singles

China is intensifying a national campaign to convince i single to date, get married and have children. Indeed, local governments are calling married women to ask if they intend to have children and are ready to offer subsidies to couples to encourage them to have more than one child. According to what the Financial Times reveals, among other initiatives, universities have been asked to introduce so-called “courses of love” for single students in order to promote a “systematic knowledge of marriage”.

The fact is that the number of Chinese citizens is decreasing and the number of deaths exceeds that of births, and local governments are pushing to reverse the trend to change an increasingly bleak demographic outlook. The State Council, China’s cabinet, revealed in recent weeks that it is drawing up a plan to build a “birth-friendly society” as part of a broader stimulus package for the now struggling economy. The details of this plan are still being finalized. Meanwhile, married women in their 20s and 30s across the country are receiving phone calls from local officials asking them about their maternity plans: according to sources interviewed by the FT, they have been offered a subsidy worth the equivalent of 14 thousand dollars to have a second child.

According to a government calculation, couples need to have an average of 2.1 children to reach the population replacement rate. In recent months, state-run newspapers People’s Daily and Life Times have published scientific research suggesting that childbirth is good for the mother’s health and can even help prevent cancer and treat some diseases. However, experts are skeptical that official measures aimed at supporting the birth rate will convince young people to start families, especially because the increase in unemployment and the slowdown in economic growth they are slowing down consumption.

According to Wang Feng, an expert on Chinese demography at the University of California, interviewed by the FT, officials are resorting to the same “playbook of using administrative power to achieve demographic goals” that was evident during the era of the one-child policy , the 35 years since 1980 in which families were limited to having just one child. But while Beijing succeeded in preventing couples from having multiple-child families, it is more difficult to use such administrative powers to achieve the opposite result. Furthermore, there are no signs that access to birth control or abortion will be limited. And furthermore, according to Wang, the challenge of convincing young couples to have more children appears even more uphill as the cost of living is not only becoming increasingly higher but also because the motherhood often represents a serious penalty for women’s careers when they leave their jobs to have children.