Chinese Officials Quiz Women on Phone as Birth Rate Declines

Local governments in China have begun contacting women of childbearing age as part of efforts to reverse the country’s flagging birth rate.

In a now-deleted report published Monday by Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post, a woman from Fujian province surnamed Huang, 35, recounted how surprised she was to answer a phone call from a grassroots government employee who asked prying questions about her intentions to grow her family.

“Sorry to disturb you. I am from your sub-district office, are you pregnant now?” she quoted the grassroots social worker as asking. They even asked when she’d had her last period and offered to call back again to remind her when it was “the right time” to conceive a second child.

Changing attitudes among younger Chinese and the rising costs of living in major cities have taken their toll on the number of births in the country of 1.4 billion. The fertility rate, or number of births expected per woman, in 2023 dipped for the seventh consecutive year, well below the minimum 2.1 considered necessary to replace a population.

At the current rate, six people will die for every single child born, Beijing-based YuWa Population Research Institute wrote earlier this month in a report highlighting the demographic crisis.

“I laughed so hard when I told my husband about it,” Huang told SCMP. “The surveyor must be from the previous generation, who did not realize that she was talking to a whole different generation that values privacy, quality of life, and choices much more.”

Chinese policymakers worry about the long-term effects a shrinking population could have on the world’s second-largest economy, prompting the call campaigns targeting Huang and tens of thousands of women like her.

Newsweek reached out to the Chinese Foreign Ministry with a written request for a response.

Beijing scrapped its decades-old one-child policy to allow for a maximum two children per household in 2016, before expanding this to three children after just five years. However, this and other pro-natal initiatives introduced at the central and municipal levels have failed and are viewed by many citizens as being too little, too late.

When pressed to explain why she had no plans for more children, Huang told the official she had “no money, no time and no energy.”

Central government pressure has driven increasingly desperate local authorities to phone up tens of thousands of other women across the country. Those reluctant to give birth have often cited the same reasons as Huang, district-level officials from three provinces told SCMP.

Many of those contacted have also voiced frustration over being heavily fined for having children before policies were loosened, saying the government should refund that money if it’s serious about encouraging births, a Fujian official surnamed Lin said.

Last month, the National Health Commission’s China Population and Development Research Center announced it was surveying 30,000 women across 150 counties in a bid to better understand prevailing attitudes toward parenthood.