Opinion | Chinese women in Hong Kong and on the mainland have fewer children than the norm – and they’re fine with that

While pro-natal policies may help remove some obstacles to a higher birth rate, policymakers will find it harder to persuade women to have more babies when they simply don’t want to, possibly because they themselves are from small families

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Published: 7:00am, 5 Jun 2019Updated: 7:00am, 5 Jun 2019

For about 20 years, women in Hong Kong have reliably told survey-takers that their ideal number of children is one or two. The average “ideal” value has been around 1.6 children. The stability of this estimate could easily cause one to think that a fertility ideal of 1.6 children is normal. But, in fact, it’s quite unusual.

According to research I’ve conducted for the US-based Institute for Family Studies, it is exceedingly rare for women to report average fertility ideals below two children. Women in Korea, Japan and Singapore say they consider between two and three children to be ideal. Surveys vary for Taiwan, but most suggest ideals of between 1.8 and 2.4 children per woman.

Data from the United States suggests that ethnically Chinese women there have slightly lower fertility ideals than other women in America, but still report ideals around 2.2 to 2.5 kids per woman, while data from Malaysia suggests that the average Chinese woman there also wants to have two or three children, which is much lower than Malays, but still globally normal.

The only places outside China with well-documented fertility ideals below two children per woman have been a few Eastern European countries during the 1990s as they recovered from the disruptions of the fall of communism, and also, curiously, the Mediterranean island of Malta.

A couple pose for wedding photos in Hong Kong. For years now, Hong Kong women’s ideal number of children has been one or two, lower than in many other places in the world. Photo: AFP

Thus, Hong Kong’s “normal” turns out to be globally abnormal. Plus, given the much higher fertility ideals expressed by women in Taiwan and Singapore, Chinese women in Malaysia, or Chinese-American women, we can safely say that Hong Kong’s low fertility ideals are not universally shared among all culturally Chinese people.