China Is Pressing Women to Have More Babies. Many Are Saying No.

Chinese women have had it. Their response to Beijing’s demands for more children? No.

Fed up with government harassment and wary of the sacrifices of child-rearing, many young women are putting themselves ahead of what Beijing and their families want. Their refusal has set off a crisis for the Communist Party, which desperately needs more babies to rejuvenate China’s ageing population.

With the number of babies in free fall—fewer than 10 million were born in 2022, compared with around 16 million in 2012—China is headed toward a demographic collapse. China’s population, now around 1.4 billion, is likely to drop to just around half a billion by 2100, according to some projections. Women are taking the blame.

In October, Chinese Leader Xi Jinping urged the state-backed All-China Women’s Federation to “prevent and resolve risks in the women’s field,” according to an official account of the speech.

“It’s clear that he was not talking about risks faced by women but considering women as a major threat to social stability,” said Clyde Yicheng Wang, an assistant professor of politics at Washington and Lee University who studies Chinese government propaganda.

The State Council, China’s top government body, didn’t respond to questions about Beijing’s population policies.

Party lectures on “family values” are having little effect, even in rural parts of China.

Outside a mall in Quanjiao, a county in Anhui province, He Yanjing, a mother of two, said she has gotten several calls from community officials to encourage her to have a third child. She has no such plans. The preschool her son attended cut the number of classrooms in half because there aren’t enough children to fill them, she said.

Her friend, Feng Chenchen, the mother of a 3-year-old girl, said relatives are pressuring her to have more children, hoping she has a baby boy.

“Having had one child, I think I’ve done my duty,” Feng said. A second child, she said, would be too expensive. She said she tells relatives, “I can have another kid as long as you give me 300,000 yuan,” around $41,000.

Many young people in China, disheartened by a weak economy and high unemployment, seek alternatives to their parents’ lives. Many women view the prescribed formula of marriage and children as a raw deal.

Molly Chen, 28 years old, said the demands of caring for ageing relatives and her job as an exhibition designer in Shenzhen leave no room for kids or a husband. All she wants to do in her free moments is read or scroll through pet videos.

Chen followed the story of Su Min, a retiree who video-blogged about her solo road trip around China to escape a bad marriage. Chen said that the story, as well as online videos that women post about their lives, have deepened her impression that many men choose wives mostly as caretakers—for children, husbands and both sets of aging parents.

She lamented that she doesn’t have time even for a pet. “I can’t afford to take care of anything else outside of my parents and work,” Chen said.

Shrinkage

When Beijing said it would abolish its 35-year-old one-child policy in 2015, officials expected a baby boom. Instead, they got a baby bust.

New maternity wards were built only to close a few years later. Sales of baby-care products, including formula and diapers, have dropped. Businesses that focused on babies now target seniors.

New preschools built to make child-rearing more affordable struggle to fill classrooms and many have closed. In 2022, the number of preschools in China fell 2%, the first decline in 15 years.

Demographers and researchers predict that data will show Chinese births dipping below 9 million in 2023. The United Nations forecasts 23 million births in India, which in 2023 passed China as the world’s most populous country. The U.S. will have around 3.7 million babies born in 2023, the U.N. estimated.

The one-child policy brought much of China’s demographic gloom: There are fewer young people than in the past, including millions fewer women of childbearing age every year. Those women are increasingly reluctant to marry and have children, accelerating the population decline.

In China, 6.8 million couples registered marriages in 2022, compared with 13 million in 2013. The country’s total fertility rate in 2022—the average number of babies a woman has in her lifetime—is approaching one birth per woman, or 1.09. In 2020, it was 1.30, well below the 2.1 needed to keep a population stable.

The campaign for a “birth-friendly culture” has taken on the tone of an urgent national mission, with government-organised matchmaking events and a program encouraging military families to have more babies.

“Soldiers win battles. When it comes to giving birth to second or third children and implementing the national fertility policy, we are also taking the lead and charging to the front,” Zeng Jian, a top obstetrician-gynaecologist at a military hospital in Tianjin, told state media in 2022.

In August, residents of the western city of Xi’an said they received an automated greeting from a government number during the Qixi Festival, the Chinese equivalent of Valentine’s Day: “Wishing you sweet love and marriage at an appropriate age. Let’s extend the Chinese bloodline.”

The message drew a backlash on social media. “My mother-in-law doesn’t even push me to have a second child,” one person wrote. “I guess next, arranged marriages will come back,” another commented.

Beijing leans more to encouragement than the kind of coercion that marked the one-child policy. Local governments offer cash incentives for couples having a second or third child. A county in Zhejiang province gives a $137 cash bonus to every couple getting married before age 25.

In 2021, the city of Luanzhou asked unmarried people to sign up for a government-sponsored dating initiative that uses big data to find matches citywide. A district in the city of Handan provides a one-stop wedding-planning service.

Hide and seek

The shift means some women have gone from trying to dodge punishment for having too many children to being hounded to have more.

A decade ago, a woman surnamed Zhang was in a cat-and-mouse game with authorities after she decided to have a second child. She asked that her first name not be used.

While pregnant, she left her job to stay out of public view, fearful officials would pressure her to have an abortion, she said. After giving birth, in 2014, she stayed with relatives for a year. When she returned home, local family-planning officials fined her and her husband around $10,000. She said she was forced to have an intrauterine device implanted to prevent pregnancy. Authorities required her to have it checked every three months.

Months later, the Chinese government announced the one-child policy would be scrapped. For a while, authorities still demanded Zhang have her IUD checked.

She now gets text messages from officials encouraging her to have more children. She deletes them in anger. “I wish they would stop tossing us around,” she said, “and leave us ordinary people alone.”

There has been a tightening of licenses for clinics offering medical procedures to block pregnancies. In 1991, the height of the one-child policy, 6 million tubal ligations and 2 million vasectomies were performed. In 2020, there were 190,000 tubal ligations and 2,600 vasectomies.

On social media, people complain that getting a vasectomy appointment is as difficult as winning the lottery.

Officials have also tried to dial back abortions, a key tool for officials during the one-child policy. They have fallen by more than a third—from more than 14 million in 1991 to just under 9 million in 2020. China has since stopped releasing data on vasectomies, tubal ligations and abortions.

Pressurised populace

Wang Feng, a sociology professor at the University of California, Irvine, said there have been two conflicting shifts in Chinese society: a rising awareness of women’s rights and increasingly patriarchal policies.

For the first time in a quarter-century, no women are among the top two dozen officials on the Politburo. Since Xi took power in 2012, China has fallen 38 places in the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report to No. 107 in the 2023 ranking of 146 nations.

In the Mao era, the party promised to end Confucian traditions that discriminated against women. Xi has instead stressed Confucian values, including the filial duty to have children. Families also pressure women into traditional roles.

Sophy Ouyang, 40, has known since middle school she didn’t want to marry and have children. Ouyang studied computer science, one of the few women in her village to pursue advanced schooling, and works as a software engineer in Canada.

Ouyang said that throughout her 20s, her family leaned on her to marry. Her mother said that if she had known Ouyang wouldn’t have children, she would have stopped her from getting a higher education.

Ouyang cut off contact with her family more than a decade ago. She has blocked her parents, aunts and uncles on social-media apps. “If I’m a bit more gentle with them,” she said, “they will take advantage.”

The Chinese government, which sees feminism as a nefarious ideology backed by foreign forces, has detained women’s-rights activists and erased their social-media accounts in a years long crackdown.

Even so, women have become more vocal online about their experiences relating to relationships, families and work. Their posts show a personal form of feminism that is harder for authorities to police.

Simona Dai, 31, started a podcast entitled “Oh! Mama” about birth and marriage after she learned that her mother had an abortion when she was eight-and-a-half months pregnant with a girl in the early 1990s.

Dai got married when she was 26 and said she had to endure her husband’s chauvinistic views, especially during the pandemic, when they argued about household chores. She became adamant about not having children, despite pressure from the couple’s families.

She has since applied to end her marriage. “If I didn’t divorce, I might have to have a baby,” she said.

A national debate over the treatment of women erupted in early 2022, when the video of a woman—a mother of eight, kept in a shed with a chain around her neck—sparked a social-media storm. The woman’s plight resonated with Chinese women who saw a connection to their own roles.

In recent years, Beijing has raised its guard against similar instances of social-media outrage.

A woman who worked at a branch of the All-China Women’s Federation in Guangzhou from 2020 to 2021 said the branch focused on preventing gender-related topics from going viral. She said it paid more to a tech company to police social-media comments than its budget for women’s advocacy.

During training, she said, employees were warned of serious repercussions if women’s issues in Guangzhou drew unwanted social-media attention. The women’s federation didn’t respond to requests for comment.

China’s cyberspace watchdog, which polices material seen as harmful to Chinese internet users, said in December that it was targeting content “spreading wrong views on marriage.”

Some women who decided years ago against marriage and children consider themselves lucky.

Ouyang, the software engineer in Canada, said, “I feel like I’ve completely dodged a bullet.”

—Jonathan Cheng and Grace Zhu contributed to this article.

Give gold bugs their due. The yellow metal has been a light in the investing darkness. At a recent $3,406 per troy ounce, it’s up 30% this year, to the envy of stock, bond, and Bitcoin holders. Cash-flow purists will call this a flash in the pan, but they should look again. Over the past 20 years, SPDR Gold Shares , an exchange-traded fund, has surged 630%—85 points more than SPDR S&P 500 , which tracks shares of the biggest U.S. companies.

That isn’t supposed to happen. If businesses couldn’t be expected to outperform an unthinking metal over decades, shareholders would demand that they cease operations and hoard bullion instead. So, what’s going on? If this were gasoline or Nike shoes or Nvidia chips, we would look to supply versus demand. With immutable gold, nearly every ounce that has ever been found is still around somewhere, so price action is mostly about demand. That has been ravenous and broad since 2022.

That year, the U.S. and dozens of allies placed sweeping sanctions on Russia, including its largest banks, and China went on a bullion spree. Its buying has since cooled, but other central banks have stepped in. Perhaps this is unsurprising, in light of a decades-long diversification by finance ministers away from the U.S. dollar, which is down to 57% of foreign reserves from over 70% in 2000. But the recent uptick in gold stockpiling looks to JPMorgan Chase , the world’s largest bullion dealer, like a debasement trade. Investors are nervous about President Donald Trump’s tariffs, his browbeating of the Federal Reserve Chairman over interest rates, and blowout U.S. deficits.

Surging Demand

It isn’t just bankers. Demand among individuals for gold bars and coins has been surging, with some dealers experiencing sporadic shortages. Gold ETFs were bucking the trend, but flows there have turned solidly positive since last summer, including recently in China. All told, there is now an estimated $4 trillion worth of gold held by central banks, and $5 trillion by private investors. Calculated against $260 trillion for all financial assets, including stocks, bonds, cash, and alternatives, that works out to a global gold portfolio allocation of 3.5%, a record.

What’s next? BofA Securities says that central banks have room for much more gold buying, and that China’s insurance companies are likely to dabble, too. RBC Capital Markets analyst Chris Louney says ETFs could drive demand growth from here, especially if angst reigns. “Gold is that asset of last resort…the part of the investing universe that investors really look for when they have a lot of questions elsewhere,” he says.

Russ Koesterich, a portfolio manager for BlackRock , a major player in ETFs including the iShares Gold Trust , says that gold has proven itself as a store of value, and deserves a 2% to 4% weighting for most investors. “I think it’s a tough call to say, ‘Would you chase it here?’ ” he says. “There have been some pullbacks. Those might represent a good opportunity, particularly for people who don’t have any exposure.”

Daniel Major, who covers materials stocks for UBS , points out that gold miners mostly haven’t wrapped themselves in glory in recent years with their dealmaking and asset management. As a result, a major index for the group is trading 30% below pre-Covid levels relative to earnings. UBS increased its 2026 gold price target by 23%, to $3,500 per troy ounce, before gold’s latest lurch higher. Many miners are producing at a cost of $1,200 to $2,000. Major has bumped up earnings estimates across his coverage. “I think we’re gonna see further upward revisions to consensus earnings,” he says. “This is what’s attractive about the gold space right now.”

Major’s favorite gold stocks are Barrick Gold , Newmont , and Endeavour Mining . More on those in a moment. We also have thoughts on how not to buy gold—and what not to expect it to do: Don’t count on it to keep beating stocks long term, or to provide precise short-term protection from inflation spikes and stock swoons. But first, a little history, chemistry, and rules of the yellow brick road.

Flesh of the Gods

The first gold coins of reliable weight and purity featured a lion and bull stamped on the face, and were minted at the order of King Croesus of Lydia, in modern-day Turkey, around 550 B.C. But by then, gold had been used as a show of riches for thousands of years. Ancient Egyptians called gold the flesh of the gods, and laid the boy King Tutankhamen to rest in a gold coffin weighing 243 pounds. The Old Testament says that under King Solomon, gold in Jerusalem was as common as stone. Allow for literary license; silicon, an element in most stones, is 28.2% of the Earth’s crust, whereas gold is 0.0000004%.

Marco Polo described palace walls in China covered with gold. Mansa Musa I of Mali in West Africa, on a pilgrimage to Mecca in 1324, is said to have splashed so much gold around Cairo on the way that he crashed the local price by 20%, and it took 12 years to recover. To Montezuma, the Aztec king whose gold lured Cortés from Spain, the metal was called, as it still is by some in Central Mexico, teocuitlatl —literally, god excrement. Golden eras, gold medals, the Golden Rule, and golden calf—so deep is the historical association between gold and wealth, excellence, and vice that it seems to have a mystical hold on humanity. In fact, it’s more a matter of chemical inevitability.

Trade and savings are easier with money. Pick one for the job from the 118 known elements. Years ago on National Public Radio, Columbia University chemist Sanat Kumar used a process of elimination. Best to avoid elements that are cumbersome gases or liquids at room temperature. Stay away from the highly reactive columns I and II on the periodic table—we can’t have lithium ducats bursting into flame. Money should be rare, unlike zinc, which pennies are made from, but not too rare, unlike iridium, used for aircraft spark plugs. It shouldn’t be poisonous like arsenic or radioactive like radium—that rules out more elements than you might think. Of the handful that are left, eliminate any that weren’t discovered until recent centuries, or whose melting points were too high for early furnaces.

That leaves silver and gold. Silver tarnishes, but rarer, noble gold holds its luster. It is malleable enough to pound into sheets so thin that light will shine through. And, despite the best efforts of Isaac Newton and other would-be alchemists, it cannot be artificially created—profitably, anyhow. Technically, there is something called nuclear transmutation. If you can free a proton from mercury’s nucleus or insert one into platinum’s, you’ll end up with a nucleus with 79 protons, and that’s gold. Scientists did just that more than 80 years ago using mercury and a particle accelerator. But what little gold they produced was radioactive. If you think you can do better, you’ll likely need a nuclear reactor to prove it, but a large gold mine is one-fifth the cost, and we have to believe the permitting is easier.

We passed over copper due to commonness, but it has become too valuable to use for pennies. The 95% copper content of a pre-1982 penny is worth about three cents today. The equivalent amount of silver goes for $3.10, and gold, more than $320. But the three trade in different units. A pound of copper is up 17% this year, at $4.72. Silver and gold are typically quoted per troy ounce, a measure of hazy origin and clear tediousness, which is 9.7% heavier than a regular ounce. A troy ounce of silver is $32.70, up 13% this year.

Some Finer Points

Confused? This won’t help: The purity of investment gold, called its fineness, is measured in either parts per thousand or on a 24-point karat scale. A karat is different from a carat, the gemstone weight, but our friends in the U.K.—who adopted troy ounces in the 15th century—often spell both words with a “c.” Gold bricks like the ones central banks swap are called Good Delivery bars, and weigh 400 troy ounces, give or take, worth more than $1.3 million. If you buy a few, lift with your legs; each weighs a little over 27 regular pounds (as opposed to troy pounds, which, it pains us to note, are 12 troy ounces, not 16).

There are many options for smaller players, like Canadian Maple Leaf coins, which are 24-karat gold; South African Krugerrands, at 22 karats, and alloyed with copper for durability; and Gold American Eagles, 22 karats, with some silver and copper. Proof coins cost extra for their high polish, artistry, and limited runs, and may or may not become collectibles. Humbler-looking bullion coins are bought for their metal value. Prefer the latter if you aren’t a coin hobbyist. Avoid infomercials and stick with high-volume dealers. Even so, markups of 2% to 4% are common. Costco Wholesale , which sells gold in single troy ounce Swiss bars, charges 2%, but often runs out, and limits purchases to two bars per member a day. Factor in the cost of storage and insurance, too.

ETFs are more economical. For example, iShares Gold Trust costs 0.25%, not counting commissions. For long-term holders, as opposed to traders, there is a smaller fund called iShares Gold Trust Micro , which costs 0.09%.

Resist fleeing stocks for gold. The surprisingly long outperformance of gold is mostly a function of its recent run-up. From 1975 through last year, gold turned $1 invested into about $16, versus $348 for U.S. stocks. That starting point has a legal basis. President Franklin Roosevelt largely outlawed private gold ownership in 1933; President Richard Nixon delinked the dollar from gold in 1971; and President Gerald Ford made private ownership legal again at the end of 1974.

Gold has been a so-so inflation hedge over the past half-century, and at times a disappointing one. In 2022, when U.S. inflation peaked at a 40-year high of over 9%, the gold price went nowhere. The problem is that high inflation can prompt a sharp increase in interest rates. “If people can clip a 5% coupon on a T-bill, often they’d prefer to do that than have either a lump of metal or an ETF that doesn’t produce cash flow,” says BlackRock’s Koesterich.

Likewise, while gold has generally offset stock declines this year, it hasn’t always done so in the heat of the moment. Recall tariff “liberation day” early this month, which sent U.S. stocks down close to 11% in three days and pulled gold down nearly 5%. “This isn’t an uncommon scenario,” says RBC’s Louney. “When investors were losing elsewhere in their portfolio, gold was sold as well to cover those losses.”

Our top tip on how gold behaves is this: It doesn’t. People do the behaving, and they are appallingly unreliable. Use bonds as a stock market hedge. If they don’t work, fall back to patience. For inflation protection, think of assets that are a better match than gold for the goods and services that you buy every week. A diversified commodities fund has precious metals but also industrial ones, along with energy and grains. Treasury inflation-protected securities are explicitly linked to the consumer price index, which measures inflation for a theoretical individual whose buying patterns differ from your own, but are close enough.

Own a house. Stick with a workaday, reliable car. Yes, cars deteriorate. But so does nearly everything on a long enough timeline. Rely mostly on stocks, which represent businesses, which wouldn’t endure if they couldn’t turn raw inputs like commodities into something more profitable. There’s even a miner, Newmont, in the S&P 500.

The Case for Mining Stocks

Speaking of which, UBS’ Major recently upgraded both Canada’s Barrick and Denver-based Newmont from Neutral to Buy. “Both very much fall into that category of having a challenging recent track record,” he says. Newmont has lost 20% over the past three years while gold has gained 76%, which Major blames on difficult acquisitions and earnings shortfalls. Barrick, down 8%, has been in a dispute with Mali since 2023, when its government instituted a new mining code that gives it a greater share of profits. In recent days, authorities have shut the company’s offices in the capital city of Bamako over alleged nonpayment of taxes.

These are the sort of headaches that Krugerrands in a safe don’t produce. But Major calls expectations “adequately reset,” free cash flow attractive, and guidance achievable. Newmont, at 13 times next year’s earnings consensus, is selling assets, and Barrick, at 10 times, has healthy production growth.

Major also likes London-based, Toronto-listed Endeavour Mining , up 40% over the past three years and trading at nine times earnings, although he says it has “higher jurisdictional risk.” It is focused on West Africa, especially Burkina Faso, which had a coup d’état in 2022. You’d think the stock would be doing worse amid such political upheaval. Then again, Burkina Faso since 1966 has had eight coups, five coup attempts, and one street ousting of a president who tried to change the constitution to remain in power. That works out to an uprising every four years, on average.

Montezuma’s scatological name for gold might have been prescient, considering the sometimes-odious consequences for small countries that find it.