Asia Is Struggling With Declining Birth Rates

Baby Onboarding Asia In Japan, a diapers company recently announced that it would be switching its focus from babies to adults – it’s been years since the sales of its products for seniors vastly outpaced those for infants. Across East Asia and elsewhere on the continent, governments, businesses and analysts are reacting – and sometimes panicking – in relation to a steep population decline and an aging population that mean slower economic growth, a strain on services and benefits, and a shrinking labor force to pay for them in the future. And almost everyone is trying to find a way to solve the dilemma of the missing babies. This demographic cliff has mainly arisen because of brutal job markets, skyrocketing living and education costs, slow wage growth, employment insecurity, and tough corporate cultures. But many also attribute the decline to, ironically, traditional family values that have kept many Japanese and Korean women from wanting to bear children. Last year, the birth rate in Japan decreased to a record low after falling more than 5 percent compared with 2022. The approximately 760,000 babies born in 2023 were among the smallest generation born since the country began tallying the birth rate in 1899. The number of live births, meanwhile, has dropped more than 50 percent in five decades, the BBC reported. At the same time, marriages in Japan decreased by almost 6 percent. Fewer than half a million Japanese couples took vows of matrimony, the lowest rate in 90 years. Out-of-wedlock births and single parenthood, furthermore, are rare in Japan due to “family values based on a paternalistic tradition,” reported the Guardian. It’s become such a concern that recently, Tokyo officials began developing a dating app to encourage love and, hopefully, marriage and children. That’s in addition to its singles events, counseling sessions on marriage and a campaign where “lovers can have their stories of how they first met turned into comics or songs.” “Japan is standing on the verge of whether we can continue to function as a society,” said Prime Minister Fumio Kishida. Similar sentiments are expressed in the back halls of the National Assembly in Seoul. Even so, women in South Korea, which has the lowest fertility rate in the world, cite cultural hurdles, particularly for women balancing career and work demands with caring for a family, in opting out of motherhood. In the South Korean language, the term for wife is “home person.” Accordingly, South Korean wives who work grueling day jobs are also expected to cook, clean, and care for the kids, even at an advanced age, wrote the Washington Post. The gender pay gap in the country is also the highest among industrialized countries: Females earn 69 cents on the dollar compared with males. As a result, many women are opting out, noted World Politics Review. For example, the number of marriages dropped by half between 1996 and 2021. A movement, 4B, encapsulates this situation: It’s one in which its exclusively female members eschew marriage, childbirth and even dating, saying a life without a man is a life with freedom. “I’m not even fighting the patriarchy – I’ve decided to walk out of it,” said one member, Kim Jina. Some companies, however, are now jumping in to address these issues, after government initiatives such as subsidized housing for newlyweds and payments for babies failed to reverse the trends. That’s no surprise: Businesses worry over the numbers that show the workforce will halve within 50 years. Now, many are offering bonuses for babies: Booyoung Group, a Seoul-based construction company, for example, is paying new mothers and fathers $75,000 per child. Japan and South Korea, however, aren’t alone in their population woes: Throughout Asia, countries including China, Singapore, Hong Kong, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Vietnam, and parts of India are experiencing demographic crises. Work demands and traditions are often to blame there, too. A big challenge in this shift is how governments will pay for the services associated with growing elderly populations – pensions, healthcare, home health aides, etc. – when the pool of younger taxpayers who are working to foot the bill is shrinking. That’s especially a concern in countries like Japan which have long resisted immigration but is now rethinking its policies and rolling out its “tatami welcome mat,” as the Spectator put it. It’s an even bigger issue for those countries who are aging without having become wealthy such as Thailand and Vietnam, which face an aging population that is getting old in poverty, putting a burden on the already patchy provision of pensions, healthcare and other key systems. Meanwhile, these countries’ economies often depend on sectors such as agriculture that aren’t easy for the elderly to participate in. Meanwhile, China’s birth rate is especially concerning. With 1.4 billion people, the country is now the second-most populous after India, losing its top spot last year. But its population could decrease by half to 770 million by 2100 if current trends continue, argued Scientific American. That threatens its prosperity. Still, Chinese couples eschew children for the same reasons as others in Asia. Their country’s one-child policy, which sought to restrict out-of-control population growth between 1980 and 2016, was rooted in these economic motivations. “The policy supercharged the country’s workforce: By caring for fewer children, young people could be more productive and put aside more money,” wrote the Wall Street Journal. Still, the government is taking action, recently raising the retirement age to 65 and putting restrictions on abortions. And Chinese prosecutors, for example, recently exposed Chinese firms that were requiring job applicants to take pregnancy tests so they would not hire workers who would later require parental leave and other benefits, CNN reported. It’s clear: Officials in Beijing want more kids. But as in South Korea, a preference for males through sex-selection family planning as well as natural trends now means men outnumber women and would-be grooms face bleak marriage prospects, the Conversation wrote. That’s in addition to a trend showing how almost double the number of men over women desire marriage. Meanwhile, the efforts to change marriage and birth trends as well as initiatives to promote women’s rights and equality are inspiring a backlash from men, some of whom are forming groups similar to incels (shortened from “involuntary celibates”), the Economist wrote. In South Korea, New Men on Solidarity, a men’s-rights group, calls feminism a mental illness, and is courted by the country’s president who said it is hurting “healthy relationships.” In Japan, “Twitter Feminists,” has become a derogatory term. And a group called “the Center for Weak Men” is attracting strong interest. Meanwhile, only 37 percent of South Korean women say they would date a “patriarchal” man, a recent survey found. That, the news magazine added, means “the rise in anti-feminist sentiment bodes badly for the region’s birth rates.”