PRC County Offering Cash to Young Married Couples

Facts

• Amid concerns over declining birth rates and marriage registrations, officials in eastern China’s Changshan County are offering a 1K-yuan ($137) reward to young married couples if the bride is 25 years old or younger.¹
• The county, located in the eastern province of Zhejiang, announced the policy on its official WeChat account. It stipulated that the reward only applies to couples marrying for the first time and is intended to promote "age-appropriate marriage and childbearing."²
• The county’s program also seeks to ease the high costs of raising children in China by providing childcare, fertility, and education subsidies to couples who have children.³
• China’s legal age for marriage is 22 for men and 20 for women, and the country has seen a drastic drop in its marriage rate over the last 35 years. China had 800K fewer marriages in 2022 compared to 2021, with its total of 6.8M being the lowest since 1986.⁴
• The decline in marriages has coincided with a steeply decreasing birth rate. China’s birth rate fell to a record low of 1.09 per woman in 2022, with government officials trying to increase the number to offset the demographic consequences of its aging population.⁵
• China allowed women to have up to three children in 2021. However, birth rates continued to trend downward, leading many areas to offer various subsidies and rewards for couples with children.⁶

Sources: ¹Mint, ²NBC, ³Guardian, ⁴Reuters, ⁵The Telegraph, and ⁶Global Times.

Narratives

• Anti-China narrative, as provided by Project Syndicate. China created its current demographic disaster with its failed family policies over the last four decades and is now overcompensating for its mistakes. For nearly 40 years China forced a birth rate that was half of the replacement level, yet Chinese officials seem to be caught off guard that decades later the PRC has an aging population and low birth rates. China is nearing catastrophe as its demographic pyramid becomes inverted. China did too little, too late to avoid this crisis.
• Pro-China narrative, as provided by South China Morning Post. While all of the focus is on China’s rise in the last 40 years, many are ignoring China’s history of vast population fluctuation. Any civilization that is thousands of years old will have times of population growth and decline. China still has more than a billion people, and it will endure strongly regardless of whether the birth rate ticks up a bit or not in short-term cycles.

Predictions