Proposals for matchmaking committees within unions and a drive to encourage more graduate students to have babies triggered a frosty reception on social media, as officials brainstormed ways to raise China’s plunging birthrate.
In all, delegates to China’s annual meeting of parliament submitted more than 20 suggestions for ways to produce more children in a country that did not scrap a decades-long policy restricting couples to a single offspring until 2016.
The plan from a Chinese Communist Party secretary at a pharmaceutical firm in Hubei Province for “marriage committees” within trade unions to provide matchmaking services was widely criticized on microblogging platform Sina Weibo.
“Marriage is for happiness, not to meet goals,” one critic said.
Also panned was another suggestion that master’s and doctoral students should be encouraged to marry and reproduce.
“So I’m studying a master’s to birth a baby for you? Why not establish a school [for this], where people can graduate once they’ve given birth to enough,” wrote one user in a post that got about 5,000 likes.
The steep decline in China’s birthrate to last year’s record low, fueled in part by the high cost of raising children in cities, has been met with growing alarm by officials.
In a major shift last year, China announced that couples could have up to three children, but the decision was met with doubts over whether it would make much difference and questions on what supportive measures would be rolled out.
Although proposals submitted by ordinary delegates at the rubber-stamp parliament are largely symbolic, they allow matters of public concern to be discussed and in theory will also be considered by policymaking committees.
Other proposals submitted to the National People’s Congress, which started on Saturday last week and finishes today, focused on ways of alleviating pressures facing families and working women.
They included preferential tax policies, waiving kindergarten fees for a third child and penalties for employers who discriminate against parents with multiple children.
Many Sina Weibo users took the opportunity to criticize the historic tactics China had taken to control population growth.
“This is crazy, when it was the time of family planning there was forced sterilization and abortion,” said one user whose comment received more than 2,000 likes. “Now they want three children. Are women just machines?”
ROCKY RELATIONS: The figures on residents come as Chinese tourist numbers drop following Beijing’s warnings to avoid traveling to Japan The number of Chinese residents in Japan has continued to rise, even as ties between the two countries have become increasingly fractious, data released on Friday showed. As of the end of December last year, the number of Chinese residents had increased by 6.5 percent from the previous year to 930,428. Chinese people accounted for 22.6 percent of all foreign residents in Japan, making them by far the largest group, Japanese Ministry of Justice data showed. Beijing has criticized Tokyo in increasingly strident terms since Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi last year suggested that a military conflict around Taiwan could
A retired US colonel behind a privately financed rocket launch site in the Dominican Republic sees the project as a response to China’s dominance of the space race in Latin America. Florida-based Launch on Demand is slated to begin building a US$600 million facility in a remote region near the border with Haiti late this year. The project is designed to meet surging demand for the heavy-lift rockets needed to put clusters of satellites into orbit. It is also an answer to China’s growing presence in the region, said CEO Burton Catledge, a former commander of the US Air Force’s 45th Operations
Germany is considering Australia’s Ghost Bat robot fighter as it looks to select a combat drone to modernize its air force, German Minister of Defense Boris Pistorius said yesterday. Germany has said it wants to field hundreds of uncrewed fighter jets by 2029, and would make a decision soon as it considers a range of German, European and US projects developing so-called “collaborative combat aircraft.” Australia has said it will integrate the Ghost Bat, jointly developed by Boeing Australia and the Royal Australian Air Force, into its military after a successful weapons test last year. After inspecting the Ghost Bat in Queensland yesterday,
A pro-Iran hacking group claimed to breach FBI Director Kash Patel’s personal e-mail inbox and posted some of the contents online. The e-mails provided by the hacking group include travel details, correspondence with leasing agents in Washington and global entry, and loyalty account numbers. The e-mail address the hackers claim to have compromised has been previously tied to Patel’s personal details, and the leaked e-mails contain photos of Patel and others, in addition to correspondence with family members and colleagues. “The FBI is aware of malicious actors targeting Director Patel’s personal email information,” the agency said in a statement on
RSS