China has been trying to incentivize people to have more children for a few years now, and it hasn't been working. Turns out, when the future looks bleak and you don't have time outside of work to socialize, let alone raise a child, you're less likely to be willing to have one.
Add to that all the work China did for decades to promote and enforce its widely-known one-child policy, and you've got a recipe for demographic collapse.
Break down pipeline problem. PRC is generating roughly ~OECD countries combined worth of STEM talents per year with other disciplines also catching up. There's already increasing youth unemployment due to the shock of oversupply of talent that makes industries move up the value chain and economies grow. The pipeline problem is more constrained at low end labour, that's mostly going to be plugged by record automation, more than the next 15 industrial powers combined. If labour shortages persist, will be compelled to adopt some foreign worker systems like MENA countries, in which case there's about 100 millions from low/mid income countries to import on a transient basis. The TLDR is PRC is trending from a population mixture of roughly 2 Japans and 6 Nigerias to 5 Japans and 1 Nigeria over next 80 years in terms of productive potential, the latter being a significantly more productive society even if it only has 60% of people due to net human capita upgrades.
The problem with rate of birth decline IMO is it compresses and increases stress of PRC weathering society transitioning to more strategically/geopolitically suitable population levels from something like 80 years to 60 years which poses governance challenges. But productivity increase will chug on due to recomposition into a disproportionate high skilled society, by 100s of millions. Best way to conceptualize this is that PRC will be transitioning from current population mixture of roughly 2 Japans and 6 Nigerias to 6 Japans over next 60-80 years in terms of productive potential, the latter being a significantly more productive society even if it only has 60% of people due to net human capital upgrades. Higher birth rate means maybe PRC can manage transition largely alone with domestic births and automation, lower means importing 10s of millions of foreign workers and remittance outflows which is politically and strategically unpalatable. There's plenty to do, but some more politically preferrable than others.
Even if they managed to turn around China's birth trends right now, it still would take a generation to catch up. The CCP can't just will this problem away.
Maybe it’s easier to force the village elders to perform forced sterilizations than it is to do the opposite?
In authoritarian communist countries you typically see silent protests in the form of giving up of quiet quitting. This would apply to starting families as well due to low levels of hope.
China has been trying to incentivize people to have more children for a few years now, and it hasn't been working. Turns out, when the future looks bleak and you don't have time outside of work to socialize, let alone raise a child, you're less likely to be willing to have one.
Add to that all the work China did for decades to promote and enforce its widely-known one-child policy, and you've got a recipe for demographic collapse.