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‘Are women just machines?’ Chinese web users turned off by proposals to raise birth rate
- China’s steep decline in birth rates has sparked growing alarm among officials
- Setting up local matchmaking units and urging graduate students to have bigger families were among solutions submitted to the National People’s Congress
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Proposals for matchmaking committees within local trade unions and a drive to encourage more graduate students to have children triggered a frosty reception on social media in China, as officials brainstormed ways to raise the country’s plunging birth rate.
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In all, delegates to China’s annual meeting of parliament submitted more than 20 suggestions for boosting population growth in a country that did not scrap a decades-long policy restricting couples to a single child until 2016.
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A Communist Party secretary at a pharmaceutical firm in Hubei province offered a plan for “marriage committees” within trade unions to provide matchmaking services. This was widely criticised on Weibo, China’s equivalent of Twitter.
“Marriage is for happiness, not to meet goals,” said one critic.
Also panned was a suggestion that master’s and doctoral students be encouraged to marry and have children.
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“So I’m studying for a master’s to birth a baby for you? Why not establish a school [for this], where people can graduate once they have given birth to enough,” wrote one user in a post that got about 5,000 likes.
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