The Chinese government has just started another push to increase the country's alarmingly low fertility. This follows news that the population began declining last year.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
or signup to continue reading
Policy is focusing on encouraging women to marry and have children at "appropriate" ages (meaning younger ages) and on stamping out the practice of making men pay huge sums, often several years' income, to brides' families.
The need for men to find money to pay bride prices, as the payments are called, is pushing up the age of marriage and therefore reducing fertility.
Bride prices reflect a market as well as tradition: there's a shortage of women. That's another factor that's pushed China into population decline. Deaths have surpassed births not just because fertility has fallen - to 1.1 children per woman now - but because there aren't as many women as there should be.
China has 105 males for every 100 females, compared with the global average of 101 per 100. That's mainly a result of sex-selective abortion, a practice that continues now and was worse a few decades ago when today's women of childbearing age were born.
The preference for boys is weakening but persists. It's strongest in traditional families, typically those that are not in big cities. Rural couples are very likely to want a boy more than a girl, and their parents, being yet more traditional, will even more strongly want a grandson.
But the older generation's attitudes are also supporting childbirth. Their first priority is to have at least one grandchild, regardless of gender. So couples who don't want children, or at least not yet, will almost always be under pressure from their parents to get on with it.
Unmarried people in their late 20s or their 30s can expect nosy phone calls from their mothers about how things are going with boyfriends or girlfriends - meaning, "When will you marry and produce a grandchild for your father and me?"
These traditions once played out among my acquaintances in a most unusual way.
I had a friend in Beijing who came from a traditional family in north-western China and whom I'll call Joe. In 2019 he was 32 years old and had been with his boyfriend, "Rob", for, I think, about six years. Rob was 38 and also from a traditional family.
Joe had gained a PhD in economics from one of China's most famous universities and worked in finance. He and I liked to talk about economics. Rob had a PhD in cardiology from the same university and now worked there as a researcher.
Incidentally, a few years earlier Rob had worked at an Australian university as a researcher on heart disease and had wanted to stay here. Our immigration system rejected him when, following cuts to science funding in this country, he had been unable to get a new research contract.
How we managed to lose an intending immigrant of that calibre is something to wonder about. But that's not the point of this story.
Back in Beijing, Joe and Rob had two problems. Neither could tell their culturally conservative parents that he was gay, and each was under great pressure to marry and produce a grandchild. Of course, the child would preferably be a boy.
Actually, Joe and Rob really wanted to have children, anyway.
Neither wanted to use the most common ways for gay people in China to get parents off their backs. One is marriage between a gay man and a gay woman, to deceive the families of both and satisfy everyone by producing a child.
Another is for a gay man to deceptively marry an unwitting straight woman, whose life may well be ruined as she serves as the mere cultural tool of an unloving husband. It's a notorious social phenomenon in China.
READ MORE:
I've never heard of a Chinese gay woman luring an unwitting straight man into such a marriage, but I suppose it must happen. He'd be all the more unhappy about it if he'd had to pay a high bride price.
Instead of using such means, Joe and Rob travelled to the US to produce two kids by surrogate gestation. An American woman supplied the eggs for both children; the sperm came from Joe for one and from Rob for the other. Two other American women carried the children, who were born four months apart. The kids would be partly Asian and partly Caucasian in appearance, an intriguing characteristic in China.
Rob and Joe could not have done this in China, because gestational surrogacy was, and is, illegal there. The process cost them a total of $400,000.
And, yes, they required the doctors to select male embryos.
Then came the revelations to parents.
"Mum, you have a grandson," Joe said on a phone call to his mother, whose mind wandered between astonishment and delight. Her son didn't even have a girlfriend, so far as she knew, and now he had suddenly produced a son.
"And, Mum, I'm gay," he said, shocking the poor woman again and leaving her in a state of great confusion.
The next part of the story really surprised me.
The parents of both Joe and Rob completely set aside the distaste they might have felt for their sons' relationship. For all four, aged in their 50s and 60s, the overriding fact was that they now had grandchildren. Indeed, they had grandsons.
They rushed to Beijing to see the babies. While there, they arranged to take turns to come back, live with Joe and Rob for a few weeks each time and help look after the children.
Four years later, they're still doing it.
- Bradley Perrett was based in Beijing as a journalist from 2004 to 2020.