Alexandra Stevenson
speaker
19 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2026
last heard 11 May
Alexandra Stevenson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Publicly, this meeting between Xi Jinping and Donald Trump is all about stability, and the messaging will be focused on peace.
But behind the scenes, both sides are really digging in for a longer-term, more prolonged economic war.
After years of Washington turning to sanctions and tariffs to do what, from the Chinese perspective, has been perceived as constraining its economic and technological rise, China is now making moves that indicate that they are ready for a fight.
Or as one analyst told me, Beijing is basically locked and loaded.
China has known about this problem for years, and it's done a host of things to try to reverse the trend.
But nothing is working at this point.
So officials have offered cash for second and third children.
They've promised subsidized housing.
They've done even more invasive things like dispatch local officials to find out the family planning of recent married couples.
One recent policy change, which wasn't exactly
explicitly aimed at boosting the birth rate, but was widely interpreted that way, was a decision to start taxing condoms and contraception.
It's kind of like across the board, there's been an all-out push, basically.
And even the top leader, Xi Jinping, has called it a patriotic act to have a baby.
In terms of why young people aren't having kids, we've been talking to a lot of people who express a sense of unease about the economy.
Many young people now are in the gig economy, which means that they're delivering packages or delivering food.
And it's not a consistent or steady income or lifestyle.
And then for younger women, there is this sense that if you get married and you have a kid, you will lose all of your independence because there's this expectation still within society in China that women run the household.
So it's really a combination of both cultural and economic factors that are weighing on a lot of young people today in China.
Oh, blow me a kiss.
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