Alice Han

So the decline is less severe in the U.S., and U.S.

is obviously helped by immigration, which China does not benefit from.

But it's clear to me that these are structural issues at play.

And to bring it to the structural domain, I've been reading a lot of Claudia Golden's work.

She is a Nobel Prize-winning economist who's specialized in labor market economics.

And one of the points that she makes is that as women become more educated and professionalized, they encounter a mismatch in the temporal and financial costs of having children.

So as women get more educated and professionalized and have higher paying jobs, the men aren't stepping up in the same way.

And so women oftentimes decide not to have kids because it becomes too much of a burden financially to them.

I think a similar thing is happening in China, where the women who benefited, I would say, from the reform and opening up.

So

the 80s onwards, and benefited from the expansion of college education in 1999, have built financial wealth and stability, and they don't really need a man, they don't really feel the incentive to have kids.

The other flip side to this, James, is declining marriage rate.

I don't think this gets enough attention.

Last year, 6.1 million marriages registered, 20% decline year-on-year from 2023, and that is half of what it was at its peak in 2013.

And the lowest it's been since, I think, the 80s, just to give people a sense of the numbers.

And on Chinese social media, but also I see this whenever I go to China, there's a huge, I think, glorification of the single woman in a way that I don't think existed, I think, even a decade or two decades ago.

You had this concept of the leftover woman or the spinster, you know, a woman past her late 20s who was unmarried and didn't have kids.

There's been a bit of a cultural movement to glorify them in some ways and say that they can have this great life as a professional, financially well-off, single woman without kids.

So I'm shocked by this and I think people really should pay attention to it because it has massive, obviously, economic implications.

You know, if China's fertility rate is less than half the replacement rate, which is 2.1%,