Department Talk

Reproduction links the personal and the political. With a total fertility rate that has stayed far below the replacement level since the early 1990s, China now finds itself in the company of the rest of the low fertility societies, facing similar issues of shrinking labor pool and rapid population aging. After more than 35 years of enforcement, China’s one-child policy was formally replaced by a universal “two-child policy” in 2016 in the hope that the new policy will boost the country’s fertility level. Drawing on the gender equity framework that highlights the incompatibility in gender equity levels between the public and the private spheres in explaining fertility transition, I investigate fertility intentions and obstacles among young Chinese men and women, and their attitudes toward changes in the state’s population control program.