China removed a three-decade-old tax exemption on contraceptive drugs and devices from January 1 in new steps to spur a flagging birth rate.
Condoms and contraceptive pills now incur value-added tax of 13%, the standard rate for most consumer goods.
China exempted childcare subsidies from personal income tax and rolled out an annual childcare subsidy last year, following a series of “fertility-friendly” measures in 2024, such as urging colleges and universities to provide “love education” to portray marriage, love, fertility and family in a positive light.
Top leaders again pledged last month at the annual Central Economic Work Conference to promote “positive marriage and childbearing attitudes” to stabilise birth rates.
China’s birth rates have been falling for decades as a result of the one-child policy China implemented from 1980 to 2015, and rapid urbanisation.
The high cost of childcare and education as well as job uncertainty and a slowing economy have also discouraged many young Chinese from getting married and starting a family.
China has a pretty substantial demographics problem. Like, I’m not saying that this particular policy is the way to handle it or that it’s effective, but it’s very probably going to have a lot of unpleasant effects if they aren’t able to turn it around. You’d expect them to be trying to do something about it.
https://www.populationpyramid.net/china/2024/
Their 50-54 age cohort is about 120 million.
Their 0-4 age cohort is about 50 million.
They currently have 1.4 billion people.
The UN projects them to have 633 million people in 2100.
If you want to have elderly people retiring and working-age people supporting them, then your ratio of retirees to working-age people going way up is going to create some pretty serious issues. Do you just have increasingly-decrepit people work until they go? Tax the working population a lot more? Slash the standard of living for the elderly? All of those are going to seriously suck for at least some portion of the public.
searches
https://www.cfr.org/blog/what-chinese-pension-system-and-why-are-its-problems-hard-fix
Tbh I think if any country is positioned to overcome demographics problems it’s China. They have all of the manufacturing infrastructure and investing heavily into robotics and low maintenance systems. So I really dont understand such a stupid political move. As if 0.1$ more expensive condoms will start creating babies. It almost feels like a big show of control to people rather than anything tangible.
If you want to see what the future holds for a nation in that position, look no further than Japan. Its already facing the same demographic crisis, already trying to lean heavily into robots and automation. Japan also holds the same strong xenophobic stance to immigration, which would be the other way to address a falling birth rate. It’s not looking good for Japan on this front. South Korea is not too far behind Japan. With the USA going to war with its immigrants, we’ll be experiencing the same problem ourselves in another 20 to 40 years.
Tbh I think Japan is mostly doing fine and China has much more time given in entered the issue with tech that is much more mature.
Lets say both countries are successful with automation. I think you’re missing the bigger point of the working population collapse. Robots don’t pay taxes.
They have a point, you can’t train an army when there aren’t people joining the army, you can’t manufacture when there aren’t people in the factories.
At least they are trying to address the birth ratio problem of the modern world, so different to the west where the agenda is planning to just the upper 10% can afford to have children. I mean who will want to reproduce with all these weird ideologies being preached.
They could always open their borders to immigrants… Except no one wants to live there and they are so racist