In class earlier this week, our teacher asked us to discuss 丁克家庭, a phrase that comes from a transliteration of the English abbreviationg DINK — an abbreviation I’ve never heard used in English, that stands for Double Income No Kids households. According to Chinese media, more and more couples in big cities like Shanghai are choosing to focus on their careers instead of having a child, and the phenomenon has made for a popular discussion topic.
I assumed that everyone in the class would be in favor of the 丁克 phenomenon — in a country with policies in place to keep down fertility rates, it seems like it would be ideal if some families choose not to have children, and other families could then have the option of having more children. But almost all of my classmates are Asian (most of them are from South Korea and Vietnam, plus two from Japan, one student from Turkey, and me), and apart from me, all of the other students said that they do not approve of the rise of 丁克 households. In cultures where children essentially serve as their parents’ pension plan, and on a more spiritual level, are necessary for passing on the family line and taking care of the souls of deceased ancestors, not having children at all becomes problematic. Some of my classmates also looked at the issue from the perspective of the individual family, claiming that children are essential for a happy marriage, and others said that they considered having children to be a couple’s responsibility to society.
The way demographic trends are looking, my classmates are probably right that China is going to need more babies. This summer, there was quite a bit of media attention over Shanghai’s recent campaigns to encourage couples in which both husband and wife are only children to take advantage of the fact that the one-child policy allows these couples to have two children, instead of just one. Given the cost of raising a child in Shanghai, few families take advantage of this aspect of the policy, and some media reports claimed that Shanghai’s efforts to convince more only-child couples to have two children was a sign that the one-child policy as a whole might be up for revision in the near future. There haven’t been any other signs that the government plans to revise the one-child policy, so the Shanghai campaign is probably not representative of a broader trend, but either way it does seem like Shanghai is particularly worried about its upcoming demographic problem. So why isn’t there more talk about abolishing the one child policy? Maybe there’s a bit of social engineering going on — rather than get rid of the one child policy, which would probably lead to people in the countryside having more children, city governments would prefer that highly educated city residents instead have their assigned share of babies.
Either way, fertility rates have fallen drastically, and China will soon be facing the same demographic challenge that most of the developed world is already beginning to grapple with. For a cool graphical representation of how China’s fertility rate and life expectancy has changed over the past century, gapminder.org has this ready-made graph, and lots of other indicators to play around with.