I had been waiting for the next announcement. This is the latest move in a series in service of the overarching policy, "increase fertility". In 2015 the CCP b

I had been waiting for the next announcement. This is the latest move in a series in service of the overarching policy, "increase fertility". In 2015 the CCP became aware the country was falling off a demographic cliff. It has the example of Japan, whose working-age population has been decreasing since 1997. And it can see the same development in South Korea. At the time the party responded by altering the one child policy to two children. Since then it's been lifted to three. That was followed by tax breaks and offering parental leave. (In minuscule quantities, but dilution happens when policy directives filter down from the top.) Once low fertility has become ingrained in a culture, it takes a lot more than that to turn it around, though. Especially with other anti-fertility head winds (below). This year the party has: - put limits on for-profit tutoring and banned teaching the school syllabus to under-sixes--the costs of these were seen as a major road block to having more than one child. - publicly compared video games to opium (which probably has immense cultural resonance), and acted to limit on-line shopping/personal finance-- both alternative uses of time to the "delights of domestic society". - and now the party has acted to reduce the effect work has on fertility by helping people to have some time and energy left after work. (Which time and energy it would be inadvisable to spend on video games or shopping, given the panopticon in China.) ---- The party will need to go further, though. There are still a lot of things in the way of having more than one child. The party will have to alter the hukou system so that children can attend schools and medical facilities in the cities where their parents work rather than in the villages where they officially live. It will have to reform the gaokao college entrance exam system. It will also have to act to curb housing prices (Chinese men basically can't get a partner unless they own housing), and it will have to raise retirement ages and introduce a pension so that people don't have to save so desperately to support their parents and then themselves in old age. (Retirement is at 55 for women in China--or was until recently.) I expect raising retirement ages to come soon, maybe in two years. However, once a generation has been raised in which one-child familes is the norm, it's difficult to lift fertility to two or more children. 1. Japan's working age population: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LFWA64TTJPM647S https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LFWA64TTJPM647S 2. Japan's population pyramid for comparison: https://www.populationpyramid.net/japan/2019/ https://www.populationpyramid.net/japan/2019/ 3. China's population pyramid: https://www.populationpyramid.net/china/2019/ https://www.populationpyramid.net/china/2019/