Home » When the “Chain Girl” fermented, Xi Jinping’s headache added another scholar to throw a heavy parenting cost report | Xi Jinping | China | Fertility Cost | Fertility Rate | GDP | Economy | Demographic Crisis | Population |

When the “Chain Girl” fermented, Xi Jinping’s headache added another scholar to throw a heavy parenting cost report | Xi Jinping | China | Fertility Cost | Fertility Rate | GDP | Economy | Demographic Crisis | Population |

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When the “Chain Girl” fermented, Xi Jinping’s headache added another scholar to throw a heavy parenting cost report | Xi Jinping | China | Fertility Cost | Fertility Rate | GDP | Economy | Demographic Crisis | Population |

[Voice of Hope, February 23, 2022](Comprehensive report by our reporter He Jingtian)The “Iron Chain Girl” incident in Feng County, Xuzhou, Jiangsu Province is causing a wave of public condemnation. The Beijing-based Yuwa Population Research Think Tank recently released the “Report on the Cost of Birth in China”. It was jointly written by Jia Liang Jianzhang and Ren Zeping, a well-known economist. On February 23, a number of Chinese and foreign media either reprinted the full text or reported on the main content of the report. The report once again brought China’s population crisis to the fore, hitting a headache for Beijing.

The cost of parenting in China is higher than in developed countries

In 2019, the average cost of raising children aged 0-17 in Chinese families was 485,000, according to the “China Fertility Cost Report” published by the Beijing-based YuWa Population Research Institute on Tuesday (February 22). The average cost of parenting from the age of 0 to undergraduate graduation is 627,000 yuan, which is 6.9 times the per capita GDP of China in that year.

The higher the multiple of the cost of support relative to per capita GDP, the greater the pressure on parenting, and the lower the fertility rate.

According to the report, from an international comparison of parenting costs, the cost of raising a child to the age of 18 relative to per capita GDP is 2.08 times in Australia, 2.24 times in France, 2.91 times in Sweden and 3.64 times in Germany. Times, the United States is 4.11 times, Japan is 4.26 times, China is 6.9 times, almost the highest in the world.

Childcare costs are higher in China’s big cities, reaching more than 1 million yuan in Shanghai and 969,000 yuan in Beijing. Birth rates in these two cities are even lower than the Chinese average.

Ranking of 0-17-year-old parenting costs across China

The report believes that the cost of childbearing is one of the most important factors affecting the willingness of families of childbearing age to bear children. According to the results of a sampling survey of China’s fertility status conducted by the former CCP Health and Family Planning Commission in 2017, the top three reasons for women of childbearing age not to have children are “heavy financial burden”, “too old”, and “no one has children”. They accounted for 77.4%, 45.6% and 33.2% respectively.

Experts on population research at Yuwa, headed by Liang Jianzhang and Ren Zeping, warned that the drop in the birth rate would profoundly affect China’s economic growth potential, innovation capacity and welfare burden. To this end, China should introduce policies to reduce the cost of childbearing for families of childbearing age as soon as possible. Among them, the three measures of cash and tax subsidies, housing subsidies, and the establishment of nurseries are the most important measures to encourage fertility, which can greatly reduce the cost of parenting and effectively increase the fertility rate. The total financial investment required accounts for about 5% of GDP, but The fertility rate can be increased by about 50%, and 5 million more children can be born each year.

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After the report was released, it attracted a lot of heated discussions among netizens. Some netizens said that the cost of raising a child for a year is at least 50,000 yuan. In addition to getting married, buying a car and buying a house, the minimum raising cost is 1.5 million yuan.

A Zhejiang netizen believes that in Zhejiang, the cost of raising 40,000 yuan a year is basically considered poor. More netizens humorously said that not having children is equivalent to earning 1 million.

Netizens discuss
Netizens discuss

The “Chain Girl” incident continues to ferment CCP officials digging holes for Xi Jinping?

It is worth noting that the childcare cost report released by the Yuwa Population Research Think Tank coincides with the continuous fermentation of the “chain girl” incident in Feng County, Xuzhou.

“Deutsche Welle” reported on February 23 that China’s “chain girl” has attracted a lot of attention, and public opinion still remains after the Winter Olympics.

An author who signed “Mr. Bond” wrote on “Tianya Forum” on February 21, “As an educator, I have been following the ‘Chain Girl’ incident in Feng County since the very beginning.”

The author said that all the official media kept silent at the beginning, but for more than three months, from the Year of the Ox to the Year of the Tiger, after the Chinese New Year, the Winter Olympics and other large-scale hotspots, the popularity of the “Chain Girl” incident has not diminished. With the power of the people, the reading volume of this event is getting higher and higher. When the Winter Olympics is about to end, it has reached a peak, far surpassing the Winter Olympics.

“Shui Muding,” a Chinese writer who has 850,000 followers on Weibo, said, “I think the matter of the iron chain girl in Fengxian County is an unprecedented and extremely special experience in the years I have been online.”

“Shui Muding” went on to say, “In the past, such hot spots will soon be silenced and traced. But this time, for more than a month, the hot spots on major platforms have been repeatedly reduced in popularity and artificially blocked… It It still hasn’t disappeared from people’s sight.” There are even “old investigative reporters who went to investigate spontaneously. Netizens spontaneously searched for various materials and passed them on. When I almost felt that the conclusion was over, I saw a new clue.”

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On February 23, independent scholar Deng Yuwen said in a guest commentary column of Deutsche Welle that the public opinion storm caused by the “Chain Girl” incident in Fengxian County was the most serious since the Internet began in China.

The article argues that today’s CCP officialdom can be regarded as a “siege city” isolated from the outside world. The big and small events that take place every day in the “besieged city” have no direct relationship with the people outside the “besieged city”: the CCP has a strict hierarchy and requires absolute allegiance to obedience. Anyone who wants to enter the “siege city” must follow the party’s “rules”. For officials, this is not an “iron chain” in another sense. The difference between them and the “chain girls” is that the latter are forced to accept chains, while most officials are voluntarily put on chains by the system. Compared with Dong, the resistance of the iron chain girl is of no avail, and the officials are different. They obey or “loyalty” on the surface, but they can “dig a hole” for the CCP system and a statue.

The article explained that the so-called “digging a hole” means that officials do not actively solve problems for the party and solve problems, but instead use a flat attitude, react negatively, and even magnify or create problems in the process, and finally solve small problems. It has become a big problem, to the point where it has to be dealt with by the highest authorities. In a familiar phrase, officials are “waiting for something to happen”.

Yuan Hongbing, a well-known liberal jurist living in Australia, also believes that the evolution of the “Iron Chain Girl” incident to this day reflects the current situation of the CCP’s officialdom before the 20th National Congress: almost all officials lie down and do nothing. It should be at least the Women’s Federation and the Red Cross, but none of the institutions set up by the Communist Party care about and manage this matter. This is a dilemma that Xi Jinping has encountered.

The release of the childcare cost report can be said to have once again hit the Chinese government’s headache for the population crisis.

French “Express Weekly” reporter Bruillette once pointed out that the CCP once used a large population as a powerful bargaining chip. When it wants to exert pressure on its economic partners (such as the European Union), it will not hesitate to emphasize its internal huge market potential.

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China also takes comfort in the fact that it has the largest population in the face of its biggest rival in Asia and neighbor India. But according to United Nations projections, by 2030, India’s population is expected to surpass China’s.

For Beijing, the main concern is the economy: a shrinking population could thwart its plans to displace the United States as the world‘s No. 1 economic power. Over the past 40 years, China’s astonishing rise has largely relied on the advantage of a vast pool of low-cost labor. However, China’s population is shrinking year by year. According to a study published in The Lancet in September 2020, by 2100, China’s population will decrease from the current 1.4 billion to 732 million, a reduction of 48%.

China’s population could decline by 0.5% a year by 2030, with a similar impact on GDP and a difficult-to-assess impact on China’s global standing, according to estimates by Capital Economics.

The well-known blogger Zhibensha president Qinghe wrote on January 14 that China is facing the severe challenge of low fertility and aging. According to the seventh national census, China’s current total fertility rate is only 1.3. This data is lower than the normal “population replacement” level of 2.1, lower than the “highly sensitive warning line” of 1.5, lower than the world average total fertility rate of 2.41, lower than the average level of 1.9 in upper-middle-income countries and 1.6 in high-income countries. Even lower than the Japanese level of 1.34. According to demography, China, like Japan, has fallen into the “low fertility trap”.

In the decade from 2010 to 2020, China’s labor force fell by 45 million, and will lose another 35 million in the next five years. A Chinese government research team predicts that by 2050, China’s elderly will account for one-third of the total population.

According to an official CCP report released in 2019, China’s pension balance will be exhausted by 2035. In almost half of China’s provinces, the pension crisis has arrived.

A poll by the state-run Xinhua News Agency found that 93 percent of respondents were not considering having a third child at all, and the poll was removed within hours. An online comment summed up the prevailing sentiment: “Does the government think I’m not buying a Rolls-Royce because of restrictions?”

Responsible editor: Lin Li

This article or program has been edited and produced by Voice of Hope. Please indicate Voice of Hope and include the original title and link when reprinting.

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