Prioritizing Self over Successors: Exploring Fertility Perspectives in Modern China

In May 2022, the term "the last generation" blew up on Chinese social media. Tons of young Chinese folks were saying they don't want kids. This took me by surprise for a few reasons.

First off, it goes against what the Chinese government is pushing for - they want people to have more babies. Second, earlier research showed that even with the strict birth control policies in the past, Chinese people still wanted kids. And third, having kids is a huge Confucian value that's deeply rooted in Chinese culture. So what gives?

It seems like something is shifting here. The government wants one thing, tradition says another, but young people are saying "no thanks" to having children. I wonder, when people talk about having kids these days, what are they talking about? 

The findings reported below are currently submitted to an academic journal and under review. So, I will just briefly summarize the interesting findings here for a preview.

In August last year, settled on six common phrases about having kids: 生小孩, 生孩子, 生儿育女, 生育, 生子, and 生娃, I scraped a total of 45,325 Weibo posts from June to July 2023. Because this trend was still a hot topic at that time, I believe the time span of these posts were appropriate.

After combining all those posts and cleaning up the data, I used jieba to break down the text in Python.

Next, I trained a fastText model on the tokenized posts to get word embeddings using genism. Word embeddings are a way to capture the meaning and relationships between words in textual data.

So now we've got this corpus of Chinese social media posts all tokenized and embedded. Next, the top 100 most semantically similar words to the six target words were identified from the embeddings.

After training up the model on the Weibo posts, some fascinating word clusters popped up related to having kids. There were 12 clusters total that hooked into our fertility keywords.

A few clusters really jumped out at me, showing some personal emotions and individual values playing a role. Some cluster had words like "happiness", "joy", and "feeling of happiness". Some talked about "freedom", "free choice", and even "freedom in dating and marriage". Some had heavier words like "suffer" and "the rest of my lifetime".

So it seems like a lot of the discussion ties into people's personal feelings, wants for independence, and even fears about struggle. Not as much traditional cultural pressure jumping out. Though interestingly, one cluster did have the family-oriented value of "succession" while also mentioning things like "cut off relations" and "voluntarily". So there are definitely some family tensions bubbling up too in these posts.

Together with the suffering and lifetime fear words, those tensions paint a bit of a negative picture around attitudes on having kids. More personal agency coming through rather than societal tradition. Which definitely lines up with the "lying flat" generational shift we're seeing unfold!

Here's the t-SNE plot showing the top 100 words (translated) co-occurred with the six target words:

How about compare this with those posts collected years ago? Will there be any difference?

Luckily, some researchers had already put together a huge open Weibo dataset that I could tap into. This corpus from Li et al. (2018) has around 5 million posts mainly from people living in mainland China between 2011-2014. Handy!

They went ahead and created word embeddings from all those posts already too. Word embeddings are a way to mathematically represent the meaning of words based on the company they keep. So I was able to grab those pre-trained Weibo embeddings to use as a baseline for comparison.

Now I can see if the meanings of any words around having kids might be shifting from that 2011-2014 corpus to the posts I collected in 2023. 

When we looked at the topics coming up in the old 2011-2014 Weibo data, some expected themes popped up. There was obviously still discussion around the one-child policy in some clusters. And I saw some familiar talk in some clusters about couple relations and medical issues - still relevant today. 

But a key theme back then was around "caring for parents". Words like "support elderly parents" and "financial support" appeared a lot. This connects back to the ancient concept of "Yang’er Fang Lao" - having kids so they can take care of you when you're old. That's a very traditional Confucian value that was coming through strong in the old corpus.

I also saw some old school type topics like "arranged marriage" and "taking a concubine". Very traditional domains around marriage and family.

Contrasting all that to our new 2023 corpus, I didn't see any of those personal feelings concepts like suffering or desire for freedom and independence. And definitely no negativity toward having babies. 

So it seems the discourse and attitudes related to fertility are seriously evolving over the past decade. Shaking off some of the traditional motivations and values around childbearing and family. Really fascinating to see these conversations develop and change over time!

I will just leave the original Chinese version here:

In fact, the the Chinese Common Crawl Corpus (Grave et al., 2018)  also produced a similar results: No personal feelings!

All the findings above, suggesting a change of topic in the discourse over time. People on Weibo start caring about themselves rather than fulfilling traditional social norms.

I also wonder if there's any existing survey data that can back this up. Some existing national surveys conducted in China, especially collected in recent years, contain items measuring public opinions about having babies. Let's take a look:

First up was the World Values Survey (Inglehart et al., 2021), an awesome international dataset covering over 129,000 people across 90 countries from 2017-2021. Since those traditional values of having kids to care for parents and continue the family line came up earlier, I pulled out two survey questions to analyze - Q37 ("It is a duty towards society to have children") and Q38 ("Adult children have the duty to provide long-term care for their parents"). Just looked at the Chinese respondents' answers.

The second source was the China Family Panel Studies, a representative survey of over 62,500 Chinese folks in 2020. This one included a whole section assessing traditional values around why people might want kids. The mean score of three items were used: having kids to care for you, to carry on the family line, and to provide financial support. Researchers have labeled those three as a "traditional values" factor before (Sheng & Li, 2023).

The survey results showed that overall, Chinese people still tend to agree with those traditional family values around having kids. But when I compared across ages, there was a clear difference - younger generations showed much less support for those traditional ideas.

As an interesting comparison, I also plotted data from Americans on the right. Looks like a different story here:

Digging into the CFPS data, I ran a Pearson correlation between age and endorsement of those childbearing values. And there was a significant positive correlation - older folks believe much more strongly than young people. It seems that young Chinese today just don't buy into the whole "having kids for my family" thing.

The message coming across loud and clear is that traditional motivations for having kids are fading among younger generations in China. Pressure from society and duty to parents used to dominate conversations around childbearing. Now? Personal freedom and choice. Young Chinese folks are forging their own paths about if, when, and why to have children - and they have some valid concerns about struggle and suffering holding them back as well.