China Stresses Family Values as More Women Put Off Marriage, Childbirth

Under Xi Jinping, the Communist Party has brought back talk of family values and women’s importance as caretakers, messages that many women say are out of step with their thinking on when—or even whether—to marry.

The party has long prided itself on promoting gender equality, but also demands that households follow its priorities of the moment. The emphasis on women’s role in educating children and caring for the elderly comes as birth and marriage rates drop, trends that may have dire economic consequences.
In the early years of Communist rule, Mao Zedong urged women to join the workforce to help build the nation and to hold off on marrying and having children. Later came edicts that couples could have only one child to avoid runaway population growth.

During Mr. Xi’s time in power, new party slogans emphasizing “family, family education and family virtues” or “pass on the red gene” have been coupled with efforts to censor voices on women’s rights.

In recent days, more than a dozen accounts used by women’s-rights groups were deleted from the Weibo social-media platform as well as cultural-discussion site Douban.com.

The deletions came as China awaits the results of a once-a-decade census, which had been expected by early April but have yet to be released. Demographers expect the data to show a sharp drop in births in 2020, the fourth straight decline following a brief rise in 2016, the first year after the one-child policy was lifted.

“What are they afraid of?” asks one user in reference to the deleted accounts. “Are they afraid of more women waking up? Are they panicking when seeing the fertility rates and marriage rates?”

Neither Douban nor Weibo responded to requests for comment. Weibo said in a post on its verified official account that some accounts were taken down because they were “related to illegal or hurtful information.” It didn’t elaborate. A spokeswoman for China’s National Statistics Bureau said in a Friday briefing that the agency needed additional time on the census because there was more data to process than in previous ones.

Many women, especially in cities, say they are in no hurry to get married and have a family.

Liang Wei, 28 years old, says she has gone on at most one date a year since her last serious relationship ended four years ago. With a job at a Shanghai education consulting firm, she is financially independent. She has told her anxious parents in Jiangxi province not to pressure her. “Maybe I’ll never marry,” she says.

Caroline Chen, 32, a personal trainer in Beijing, says that back in her hometown of Zhangjiakou, about an hour’s high-speed train ride north of Beijing, women her age would have married long ago and had children. Ms. Chen is content being single and indulging interests like shooting videos and going out with her friends.

“If somebody brought up marriage, I’d run away,” she says.

Most of the women who are resisting marriage and children wouldn’t call themselves feminists, said Leta Hong Fincher, who has written two books about Chinese women. “The biggest challenge for the government is ordinary women just pushing back against pressure to get married and have children,” she says.

In 1990, almost all Chinese women married before the age of 30, according to Wang Feng, a sociology professor at the University of California, Irvine. By 2015, in cities like Shanghai, around one-fifth of women were still unmarried by their 30th birthday, Prof. Wang estimates.

Mr. Xi has built Confucian values, including conservative views of women’s role in the family, into his China Dream of nationalist revival, says Derek Hird of Lancaster University. “If you’ve got these highly educated women who don’t want to get married, that then becomes part of the demographic worries and concerns that play into this larger discourse on family values.”