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In the central Chinese province of Hubei, one small city is going the extra mile to reverse falling birth rates. Grass-roots volunteers in Tianmen are playing matchmaker for its young singles, combing through the details of all unmarried people in the area, putting the information on community posters and offering their services, according to Guangzhou-based Southern Weekend. Video footage posted on social media showed a swearing-in ceremony for the matchmakers in one village. It is one of a series of eye-catching measures adopted by the city, which is claiming rare success in turning around the dramatic decline in children born in the community. But sceptics say such campaigns can only scratch the surface of the issues and without action to tackle the main reasons why people are reluctant to have children – such as the cost of childcare – such campaigns are likely to have a limited impact. Tianmen’s methods are now being studied by more than 100 local governments, according to Ji Daoqing, the city’s Communist Party chief. The matchmaking effort formed one part of the city’s mass mobilisation campaign, with an extensive publicity blitz and financial incentives also deployed to encourage couples to have more children. One local hospital held 27 meetings in the space of 13 months to urge employees to have children, China Newsweek reported, while a series of private firms hinted at promotions and benefits in line with the local government’s policies. Ji also mobilised the health authorities to survey 170,000 women to work out how likely they were to have children, conduct house visits and arrange a series of seminars on the topic. The city authorities also promised to support new parents, including providing properly equipped nurseries “so that your children have somewhere to go before kindergarten”. In 2023, the year Ji started the campaign, the number of births in the city of more than 1 million people stood at just 6,000, a sharp fall from its recent peak of more than 18,000 births in 2016. But the following year saw the birth rate rise by 17 per cent, its first increase in eight years. It was up 5.6 per cent year on year in the first half of 2025, Ji wrote in an article for the Population Times, an official paper administered by the National Health Commission. “More than 100 cities and counties have sent teams to visit Tianmen, to learn [from our experience and observe,” he wrote. But Tianmen is an outlier in a country where birth rates have dropped every year since 2016. By 2023, China recorded just over 9 million births, the equivalent of 6.39 per 1,000 people, the lowest rate on record. In 2024, the rate per 1,000 people increased slightly to 6.77, but it was outpaced by deaths and the total population fell for a third consecutive year to just over 1.4 billion. According to a book recently published by the Communist Party outlining policy recommendations in the recently released blueprint for the next five-year plan, the authorities expect this population decline to accelerate. It said the annual population decline would reach 0.2 per cent by 2035, compared with the current rate of 0.099 per cent. This continued decline has been happening despite a series of measures by the authorities to increase birth rates over the past decade. In 2015, Beijing scrapped the notorious one-child policy, allowing couples to have two children, before raising the limit to three in 2021. A slew of measures followed, including childcare subsidies, the gradual implementation of free preschool education, direct payment of maternity allowances to individuals, and an increase in the special additional deduction standards for personal income tax. The support on offer varies from city to city, but critics say that the amounts available – the latest national subsidy scheme offers a maximum of 3,600 yuan (just over US$500) a year – are nowhere near enough. Last month, when the party’s recommendations for the next five-year plan covering the years 2026-2030 were endorsed at a major policy meeting, the issue again featured prominently. One section called for “high-quality population development”, with an emphasis on “encouraging positive attitudes towards marriage and child-rearing”. Other policies included improving maternity insurance and leave, early pregnancy care and developing affordable childcare services. But analysts have warned that the impact of such policies will be limited and it is possible the birth rate will continue to drop. They said young adults were reluctant to start families owing to high child-rearing costs, the state of the job market and changing social attitudes that have seen a fall in the numbers of people getting married. Yi Fuxian, a Chinese demographer and senior scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the United States, said the authorities would find it hard to move on from the strong-arm approach that underpinned the one-child policy. “It is unlikely that the Chinese authorities will encourage childbearing as coercively as they enforced the one-child policy. Governments can reduce births by forcing people into sterilisation and abortion, but they cannot force people to marry, become pregnant, or undergo infertility treatments, nor can they ban contraception,” he said. The government had previously imposed heavy fines on those who had more children than permitted, but Yi warned that in future it would have to spend more on subsidies, childcare and education if it wanted to encourage people to start families. He added that reducing population density and housing prices would also help but this would need extensive rebuilding in cities across the country and the cost of that could trigger a financial crisis. Demographer He Yafu wrote in a recent opinion piece for The Beijing News that the latest five-year plan favoured “promoting positive views on marriage and childbirth” over providing support and incentives. He also argued that most Chinese people would only have children after they got married, so it was important to reduce the cost of both getting married and having children, as well as guide young people to have healthy perspectives on marriage, childbirth and family life. “It’s important to advocate for social values that respect childbearing, promote getting married and having children at appropriate ages, encourage couples to shoulder childcare together, as well as to foster a positive marriage culture and abolish extravagant weddings and expensive betrothal money,” the article said. Local governments across the country have already introduced a series of measures to do this. In many parts of the country, grass-roots government workers, who spent decades imposing strict birth control policies, have switched to calling up women in their neighbourhoods, asking whether they had plans to give birth. In the hope of more marriages, they have also been encouraging couples to avoid lavish weddings that feature expensive gifts to the bride’s family. In Shanghai last month, the city authorities held a citywide arts and comedy competition designed to encourage people to have more children. The winners included skits titled “Let’s talk about the third child”, “How to prepare scientifically for birth” and “Birth hopes: let love continue”. But questions remain over whether this approach will change people’s attitudes towards childbirth. Wang Linlin, a 35-year-old unmarried woman from the eastern province of Jiangxi, said she had recently decided to have an abortion after an unplanned pregnancy because of the impact having a baby would have on her career. “Government policies encourage birth, but add to the burden of employers, who will in turn decide not to hire women. “Sure, the state gives me a birth subsidy, but what happens after that?” she said, adding that women needed more financial and career support during pregnancy. She also said that as a result of her experiences, she was now even more reluctant to become a mother, saying the idea had lost any “charm”. A recent report from the Berlin-based Mercator Institute for China Studies warned that government interventions were likely to deepen social discontent given the mismatch between official policies and the growing number of people who either wanted to remain single or have small families. The report said that population pressures had been elevated to a national security issue, trumping women’s freedom of choice and bodily autonomy and triggering a backlash on social media. Social media debates on the topic have raised similar concerns, with internet users arguing that government incentives are not enough to cover the high cost of raising a child and calling for more measures to address problems such as high housing prices or workplace discrimination against women. Other proposals to support prospective mothers have run into difficulties. For example, two years ago the country’s main political gathering of the year debated a proposal to relax a ban on single women freezing their eggs. But the courts have so far refused to budge on the issue. Last year a groundbreaking case brought by an unmarried woman named Xu Zaozao, who sued a Beijing hospital that had refused to freeze her eggs, was dismissed at the final appeal stage. Lu Pin, a veteran feminist and freelance writer, said the subsidies on offer to new mothers could not cover the cost of raising a child. “As for the propaganda itself, which aims to shift prevailing attitudes towards childbirth that have existed since the family planning era and promote the idea that having two or three children is the norm, there is still a considerable gap to bridge,” she said. “Furthermore, there has been no substantive response to other major causes of low fertility, such as gender inequality and pervasive insecurity about the future.”
