China’s young people are not surprised that their homeland has one of the world’s lowest fertility rates. In fact, most seem to empathise with the growing reluctance to have kids in China.
Many believe that there is a general consensus among China’s millennials and Generation Z that having children will impose a strong financial burden under the country’s current public welfare conditions, and that having fewer or no children is necessary to maintain one’s quality of life.
“Honestly, I don’t want to have a relationship, I don’t want to get married, and I don’t want to have children,” said Zhang Jie, a 31-year-old salesman with a small private trading company in Guangzhou who recently broke up with his girlfriend after four years. “For the working class, it is simply becoming more and more unaffordable to raise a child in urban cities.”