Chinese women are flooding regime-controlled social media with complaints that local Communist Party officials are making phone calls to harass them into having more children, the South China Morning Post reported on Tuesday.
The callers, government “grassroots” officials, sometimes demand details of their private lives including the timing of their latest menstrual cycles.
Other Asian media outlets documented similar reports of a “grassroots” campaign to pressure women, including those already parenting multiple children, into contributing towards improving China’s dismal birth rate by becoming pregnant. The phone calls seem to be part of a larger program of “birth support policy measures” that Beijing rolled out on Monday, according to the state-run Global Times newspaper to facilitate childbirth.
None of the reports mention similar phone calls to men to encourage them to marry and have children with their partners, or pressuring them to pursue medical checks to ensure their ability to have children.
China has for years documented a dramatic decline in the number of babies born annually. In January, the Communist Party’s National Bureau of Statistics revealed that the birth rate fell to a record low in 2023, driving population decline and a significant increase in the number of elderly Chinese nationals. China reportedly lost 2.08 million in population in 2023 and the number of births declined by 5.7 percent compared to the year before. Driving the national disinterest in building families are a variety of factors caused by Communist Party policies, including the imposition of the brutal “one child policy” for decades that forced women to abort second children and led to a massive imbalance in the sex of babies born in the country. China is currently believed to be home to almost 35 million more men than women. […]
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