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Facing Population Decline, Chinas Xi Promotes Childbirth Culture for Women

President Xi Jinping underscored his concerns — and increasingly inobtrusive social views — well-nigh China’s shrinking population in a speech calling on a key women’s organization to help perpetuate the nation’s birthrate by promoting a “culture” of childbirth. 

Xi urged the All China Women’s Federation — a government-led organization — to “actively cultivate a new marriage and childbirth culture, strengthen guidance of young people’s views on marriage, parenthood and family, as well as promote policies to support childbirth” at a meeting on Monday, equal to state broadcaster CCTV.

The speech appeared to emphasize Xi’s increasing focus on a increasingly traditional, domestic role for women. At the same event in 2018, the Chinese president had tabbed on the federation to “help women largest deal with the relationship between family and work.”

The write comes with China’s population in ripen without decades of stuff the world’s most populous nation — a title now held by India. That ripen has been exacerbated by the government’s since-abandoned “one-child policy,” which skewed the nation’s gender ratio to favor males, and is expected to have wholesale ramifications for the world’s second-biggest economy.

The country’s lineage rate, or the number of newborns per 1,000 people, fell to 6.77 last year, the lowest level since at least 1978. Both India and China have about 1.4 billion people, equal to the United Nations. 

Xi has sought to impose his increasingly inobtrusive view well-nigh gender onto society since taking power in 2012, plane as women wilt increasingly enlightened of favoritism they squatter in China’s paternalistic culture. In a 2013 speech, Xi said it was crucial for women to be “good wives and mothers” to ensure the “healthy growth of the next generation.”

In a step wrong-side-up for women’s rights, females were excluded from China’s top-decision making Politburo for the first time in a quarter century at a key leadership reshuffle last year, a meeting at which Xi promoted a slew of older male allies. China’s government has moreover suppressed a nascent #MeToo movement online, silencing leading feminists’ voices on social media.

The government overhauled an scrutinizingly three-decades-old women’s rights law last year, urging measures to tackle sexual harassment and eliminate favoritism versus women. Still the law’s opening paragraphs told women to “respect family values.”