For decades, the Chinese Communist Party ordered married couples to limit their procreation to one or, later, two children, a population-curbing policy entailing forced abortions and sterilization to cure wayward copulators. Now the Party is worried about declining birth rate.
In 2021, the state condescended to let families have as many as three children. I don’t know whether that new limit is very strictly enforced or why there is still any state-imposed limit at all if current policy is to encourage production of babies. But planners have to plan, and perhaps the planners fear that if they let husbands and wives make their own decisions about such things, millions of eight-kid families would soon clog the land.
One of the CCP’s ideas for boosting the baby supply is to facilitate the romances of the young people. Le Monde reports (“Chinese Communist Party launches speed dating program to halt demographic decline,” April 3, 2024):
Spring had sprung in the eastern Chinese province of Zhejiang, and local politicians were hoping that the wonderful blossoming of the peach trees would be conducive to dating. On the last weekend in March, it was the official worker’s union, in association with the Women’s Federation and the Communist Youth League, that organized three hours of activities to bring single girls and boys together—games in a circle, wrists tied with pink string and flower picking. Everything was done to bring them closer together.
It’s a form of speed dating organized by the party-state, in response to the demographic decline now facing China. For the second year running, China’s population fell in 2023, overtaken by India’s. The fertility rate, at around 1.1 children per woman in 2021, is well below the 2.1 needed to maintain the population.
One local official emceeing the proceedings gave couples a pep talk. “Let passion blossom. Pick love to make life more intense, more beautiful, sweeter.”
So…love: a good thing?
Nobody can ever just be left alone in China to live life as sweetly or bitterly as may be without benefit of governmental overseers and their threats or pieties. It could be worse. If the population gets going again, but gets going too fast in the view of the central planners, it’ll be back to forced abortions and sterilization.
