cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/17644126
Archived version (South China Morning Post)
A Chinese professor has sparked a public backlash after he asked a visiting Kazakh diplomat how to make Chinese women “have children obediently, early and in large numbers” at a think tank event.
Wang Xianju, a professor at Renmin University and a former counsellor at the Chinese embassy in Belarus, was speaking to Erlan Qarin, the state counsellor of Kazakhstan, who visited the university in November.
Qarin had given a speech on Kazakhstan’s domestic reforms and relations between the two countries at an event hosted by the Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies, a think tank based at the university.
The institute published Wang’s remarks on its WeChat account in November but the article only gained online traction – and criticism – this week. It has since been deleted.
During the question-and-answer period, Wang said he was surprised to find there were many children when he visited Kazakhstan.
He said Kazakhstan apparently had effective policies encouraging births, and he wondered how that might be possible, given that Chinese women did not want to get married and have children, and would not listen to their parents or supervisors.
“I even heard that women in Kazakhstan immediately have children after they graduate college, they have children one after another,” Wang said in a now-deleted WeChat article by the think tank.
“How could they listen to you and obediently, submissively have children, have children early and have lots of children?”
To be honest my wife and I would have had a kid or two right now if we could afford them. Cost of living prevents us. Maybe it’s the same thing there.
Depends on what you call “to afford”.
You can have dozens of kids right away… as long as you don’t mind having them born at home, no vaccinations, no doctors, homeschooling, maybe have half of them die before adulthood, force the older ones into taking care of the younger… and so on.
Maybe in Kazakhstan they don’t even have choice, but in China they already do.
It is. Their economy is not in a great place for most people, same as the US, and rather than fixing it the government is casting blame around or pretending it’s just personal choices rather than a wider problem.
The situation is far worse in China. Youth unemployment rate for example - which is highly relevant to the birth rate - is at 17.1%, compared to 9.4% in the US.