Chinese women who do not want to be mothers: "We have gone from being forced to abort to asking for many children"

• Mannequins with their faces covered, the latest from the Taliban against women: "They are like us, they are in a trap and without any kind of freedom"

• Miss Thailand and her can ring dress in tribute to her garbage collector parents

Xiao Lu says that when her aunt got pregnant with her second child, a cousin of hers reported her to the police.

It was 1997 and in China the

was still in force, seeking to stop a population explosion that would devour more bread than there was in a country in full economic openness, launched towards unprecedented developmentalism.

"Several agents went to her house and forcibly took her to a clinic to have an abortion. They didn't even give her the option of paying a fine in exchange for having the baby, something that was done in larger cities," she explains. Xiao.

His family then lived in a small town on the east coast of the country, in the province of Shandong.

Xiao, who was born there in November 1994, adds that her father had to pay

(about 680 euros, a lot of money at the time) when she was born.

"It was because my father was not yet 20 years old when he had me, which was the legal age from which men could have children," explains the twenty-something who currently works in Shanghai.

in both directions

The extreme restrictions on births in China have marked several generations like Xiao's.

"We have gone from women being forced to have an abortion or having to abandon the baby if it was the second we had, like some cases I know of, to now being asked to have many children for the good of our country. But

Last Tuesday, when it was revealed that China's population had shrunk for the first time in more than 60 years, Xiao shared the news with her friend Jin, who lives in Guangzhou, one of the most prosperous cities in southern China. China.

"Here, every few months there are

for couples for the second or third child. Now there is also talk of extending maternity leave beyond the current three months," says Jin.

Maternity and professional career

She is 34 years old, single, a businesswoman and does not have or want to have children.

She says that out of the group of urban Guangzhou friends who are around the same age as her, only one of them had a child last year.

"Having children now would

in a country where there is excessive competition, where women are tested much more than men and we have to make twice as much effort for everything. It is normal that now there are many who fall behind the age to be a mother or give it up directly, because also keeping a baby now is much more expensive than before and not everyone has the means to do so," he explains.

Jin says that she accidentally got pregnant nine years ago, when she was in a stable relationship with her then partner.

But both decided that it was still premature to be parents and decided to have an abortion.

The abortion policy has been encouraged by the central government as a tool to keep birth restrictions at bay.

Instead, last year the family planning agency announced that it would

and take steps to make fertility treatment more accessible," all to push people to have more children.

This represents a historic turn to an abortion policy in which it was perceived that the right to life began from the moment of childbirth.

delay the moment

Returning to Shanghai, the twenty-something Xiao assures that she would like to be a mother, but that after the age of 33.

Tanya, another young resident of the financial capital, has more doubts about motherhood.

"Whenever I talk to my parents or my grandparents, they pressure me to get married and have children soon. They, who are from rural China, have lived through very hard times and know what poverty is, but now the problem is not the lack of food, but what you have to

in a city as expensive as Shanghai. I don't know what will happen in the future, but now I don't want to interrupt my professional and economic development to be a mother, "he stresses.

Chinese women rebel against their government and give up having children.Getty

Tanya and Xiao, like almost everyone of their generation, are part of that bulky mass of Chinese without brothers.

Starting in 2016, Beijing launched the two-child policy to stop the collapse of the birth rate.

And from 2021 there could already be three.

But the reality is that,

well below the 2.1 necessary for the long-awaited search for a generational replacement in view of a worrying aging of the population.

Measurements from the masculine prism

"There is a major problem with the government's plans to incentivize motherhood: the people who make the policies and implement them are mainly men. As a result, many of the policies launched

deep-seated needs of women. young women", explains Chinese writer Shen Jiake in an article in the Hong Kong daily 'South China Morning Post'.

The last three years of massive confinements and movement restrictions that China has experienced during

have not helped couples to become parents either.

This year, the prospects are not good at all: the children who have to be born in the first half of 2023 had to be conceived last year, when the controls were extreme and the economy of many families was drowned by the continuous closures.

Without a doubt, with so many uncertainties, it was not the best time to get pregnant.

the figures speak

"China is a big government and a small family. The zero Covid policy has led to a zero economy, zero marriages, zero fertility," said prominent Chinese demographer Yi Fuxian, who, after collecting data on vaccinations against childhood tuberculosis, marriage registrations and searches for maternity and baby products on Baidu, the main Chinese Internet search engine, estimated that

in 2022 it fell to an all-time low of 6.77 births per 1,000 people.

"Couples who may have been thinking about having a child next year definitely put it off. Couples who really weren't sure

Justine Coulson, representative of the UN Population Fund, also explained in a report. China.

A survey by the Communist Youth League in October found that, among 2,905 single urban residents aged 18 to 26, a total of 43.9% of women said they had no intention of getting married or were not sure if would happen.

That was 19.3% more than their single male counterparts.

China's Generation Z, with its 220 million young people, has the most lopsided gender ratio in the country, with

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

Know more

• China