Key to getting the pregnancy rate back up and solving China’s population dilemma is actually a radical change to the structure of the country’s education system, says a Nanjing teacher. And it’s a change to people’s pockets that just might be the encouragement they need.
When China announced its adoption of the Three Child Policy at the end of May of last year, not a whole lot of people paid much attention.
One who did was Jiang Yuxia, headmaster at Xiaguang Kindergarten in Nanjing’s Pukou District, and a deputy to the National People’s Congress (NPC).
Up in Beijing for the fifth session of the 13th NPC, Jiang has called for increasing the compulsory education period for Chinese children to 12 years.
Under the present system, that education runs for 9 years from the age of 6. Jiang proposes to tag on those extra 3 years as kindergarten.
This way, she believes, people will be more open to the idea of having an additional child, given that the State will be picking up much of the tab for their early years’ education.
As The Paper reported yesterday, 10 March, Jiang said, “Reducing the burden of education is an important entry point to encourage fertility.”
She’s right, and it could be just the thing to address China’s rapidly ageing population. That led the country to abandon its infamous One Child Policy and adopt the Two Child Policy in 2015. The initiative tanked.
In actual fact, the opposite happened, as the number of births fell off a cliff. By the time 2019 had been seen out, the pregnancy rate among young women had fallen to a nigh-on 6 decade low, about 14.6 million babies, reported The New York Times at the time.
There’s no doubt that people need to have a lot more babies in China. But while letting them is one thing, whether or not they actually do is another altogether. And in a society that demands children out do their peers, no matter the cost, perhaps a little hesitancy is to be expected.
