Beijing's Pro-Natalist Push Continues to Strengthen

Over the past decade, Chinese authorities have steadily pivoted in the direction of encouraging births, setting out a comprehensive pro-natalist strategy in 2021. The 2025 government work report issued at the national legislative session in early March witnessed a further evolution of state policy.

Since 2021, the government work report – in setting out tasks for the year ahead – has included language on the need for family-friendly policies such as reducing childcare and educational burdens facing prospective parents, under the rubric of “improving policies supportive of childbirth” (健全生育支持政策). In contrast, the 2025 work report specifically instructs officials to formulate “policies to promote childbirth” (制定促进生育政策). And for the first time, it explicitly instructs officials to adopt financial incentives (“baby bonuses”) to encourage childbirth.

Neither of those is entirely new.  Dozens of provincial and local governments have experimented with birth incentive measures in recent years.  For example, the program adopted earlier this year by Hohot, the capital of Inner Mongolia, grants couples 10,000 yuan ($1,380) for their first child, 50,000 yuan ($6,900) for their second, and 100,000 yuan ($13,800) for their third child, issued in annual installments of 10,000 yuan.  And the “birth promotion” language dates back to the original Party policy hammered out in 2021 – even if recent years have seen the government work report adopt a more measured framing.

But the new language is suggestive of a policy line that is gradually developing as a uniform national policy, and migrating away from laudable goals of supporting the choices of individuals to have children (by removing barriers that might limit their ability to do do), in favor of state-mandated goals of raising the number of births.

Such developments raise serious questions about the implications for women’s rights - specifically, the risk that state authorities begin to regard women as instrumental vehicles for their demographic goals – in a reverse version of the anti-natalist policies pursued during the decades of Beijing’s one-child policy.

Indeed, the recently concluded national legislative session witnessed a proposal by Chen Songqi, a member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, that China both remove any restrictions on the number of children that couples may have, and that the legal age of marriage should be lowered (from 22 for men and 20 for women) to 18, "so as to increase the population base for childbearing" and “release untapped reproductive potential.”

And a recently released report by an organization of Chinese rights activists details how, faced with central pressure to encourage citizens to have more children, local officials are now actively contacting women of childbearing age to inquire about their reproductive plans, restricting access to sterilization procedures and abortion medication, and actively pressing Communist Party members and government officials to take the lead in having more children.