China’s Other Crisis
How Declining Fertility, Disrupted Social Reproduction, and Women’s Resistance Undermine CCP Capitalism
November 11, 2025
The People’s Republic of China (PRC) has been hit by capitalism’s historical tendency toward fertility decline, a result of both increasing economic burdens on the proletariat and women’s resistance. By now, labor shortages and an aging population undermine conditions that keep the PRC economy running. While these are problems for the capitalist class, the latter’s countermeasures amplify the crisis of social reproduction, with deteriorating conditions affecting all proletarians, women in particular. So far, women in the PRC have withstood the pressures from the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) regime to give up their birth strike and bear more children—further confrontations are to be expected.1This article owes much to ideas and insights that came up in a research group on the crisis of social reproduction in China and to the comments of several critical minds who read draft versions. Certain parts took on further contours after an interview the author conducted with Yige Dong, see Yige Dong and Ralf Ruckus, “The Crisis of Social Reproduction, Women’s Agency, and Feminism in China. Interview with Yige Dong,” Spectre, forthcoming.
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In July 2025, the CCP government announced the introduction of childcare subsidies. It aims to raise the number of births, as they have recently halved from 18.8 million (2016) to 9.54 million (2024). Families are about to receive 3,600 CNY (about US$ 500) per year for each child under the age of three. This childcare subsidy is wildly insufficient to raise a child, especially since the cost of childrearing is much higher in the PRC than in other countries.2“China Plans Nationwide Cash Handouts to Boost Birthrate, Growth,” Bloomberg, July 4, 2025, bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-07-04/china-plans-nationwide-subsidies-to-boost-birthrate-growth; Xinhua, “Childcare Subsidy to Benefit Tens of Millions of Chinese Families: Official,” China Daily, July 30, 2025, global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202507/30/WS6889e06ea310c26fd717c936.html; “A report released…by the Beijing-based YuWa Population Research Institute found that the average cost of raising a child in China until the age of 18 is 538,000 yuan (£59,275) – more than 6.3 times as high as its GDP per capita, compared with 4.11 times in the US or 4.26 times in Japan”; Amy Hawkins, “Cost of Raising Children in China Second-Highest in World, Thinktank Reveals,” Guardian, February 21, 2024, theguardian.com/world/2024/feb/21/cost-of-raising-children-in-china-is-second-highest-in-the-world-think-tank-reveals.
The announcement led to sarcastic comments in Chinese social media. One commentator quipped: “Are they going to refund the ‘social support fees’ paid by people who exceeded the childbirth quota back in the day?”3Cindy Carter, “Netizen Voices on New Childcare Subsidies: ‘Are They Going to Refund All the Fines Paid by People Who Exceeded Childbirth Quotas Back in the Day?,’” China Digital Times, August 11, 2025, chinadigitaltimes.net/2025/08/netizen-voices-on-new-childcare-subsidies-are-they-going-to-refund-all-the-fines-paid-by-people-who-exceeded-childbirth-quotas-back-in-the-day. The Chinese for “social support fees” is 社会抚养费 (shehui fuyang fei). The euphemism “social support fees” refers to the fines paid by parents who ignored the government’s one-child policy. Parents who had more than one child could also lose their job or have their house demolished, and deviant mothers were publicly criticized and pushed to sterilization.
Two Turnarounds
The persecution under the one-child policy began after a first turnaround in the CCP regime’s population policies. During the 1950s and 1960s, the CCP had no consistent strategy, vacillating between considering birth control measures and advocating for more children (who were needed for the construction of socialism).4On population policies in the PRC and how they changed from the 1950s to the 1970s, see Susan Greenhalgh and Edwin A. Winckler, Governing China’s Population. From Leninist to Neoliberal Biopolitics, ch. 3 (Stanford University Press, 2005). While CCP leader Mao Zedong sometimes spoke about the need for birth control, at other times he promoted pronatalist ideas—not surprisingly, as he followed other socialist leaders’ examples. At the beginning of the twentieth century, even Rosa Luxemburg and Clara Zetkin opposed others in the German socialist movement who supported the working classes’ “birth strike.” Luxemburg and Zetkin spoke out for having more proletarian children as “fighters” for the socialist cause. See R. P. Neuman, “Working Class Birth Control in Wilhelmine Germany,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 20, no. 3 (1978): 408–28, doi.org/10.1017/S0010417500009063. Eventually, the regime realized that the PRC’s high fertility rate of around six per woman could threaten economic development.5The fertility rate indicates how many children a woman (or person with reproductive capacity) will give birth to on average. This is also referred to as the total fertility rate. As a result, the CCP regime increased its “birth planning” efforts in the 1970s. It promoted premarital chastity and late marriages, and it launched campaigns to lower the number of births.6Ralf Ruckus, The Communist Road to Capitalism. How Social Unrest and Containment Have Pushed China’s (R)Evolution since 1949 (Oakland: PM Press, 2021), 97ff., gongchao.org/en/the-communist-road-to-capitalism. Its concerns corresponded to fears of an imminent “population explosion,” which would presumably result in poverty and famine. At the time such fears also shaped the discussion on population development in other countries.7For a feminist critique of the mid-twentieth century discussions in the United States and other core capitalist countries on the perceived population “bomb” or “explosion” and its use to justify policies limiting fertility in the Global South, see Carole R. McCann, Figuring the Population Bomb: Gender and Demography in the Mid-Twentieth Century (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 2017). The fear of rapid population increase leading to crises such as poverty and famine is often linked to English economist Thomas Malthus (1766–1834). Neo-Malthusian alarm regarding crisis effects of population growth has infused discussions on population control since the mid-twentieth century and is still voiced today (for instance, from within environmental movements).
By 1980, the PRC’s fertility rate had dropped to three as the CCP regime had begun economic reforms. The CCP leadership feared that the relaxation of state controls and the distribution of land to rural families could trigger a new wave of births and slow down economic growth. Therefore, it intensified its population control efforts by launching the so-called one-child policy: each family was only allowed to have one child, with special regulations for families in the countryside and for members of so-called ethnic minorities.8The CCP officially differentiates “Han” Chinese, a largely arbitrary category that makes up about 92 percent of the population and includes people with different languages and cultures, and fifty-five so-called ethnic minorities that combined make up about 8 percent. In the early years, the new policy was strictly enforced with the penalties mentioned above; it was partially relaxed beginning in the 1990s, but in parts of the country punishments, forced abortions, and sterilizations continued.
The fertility rate dropped further to 2.7 in 1990 and 1.6 in 2000. Since then, it has remained consistently low. As a result, the number of working-age people began to decline in the early 2010s.The CCP regime once again saw the economy under threat and allowed two children per family from 2015 on. Yet, the number of births continued to fall and the PRC’s entire population began to shrink in 2021. The regime began allowing three children per family in the same year and has since stepped up natalist campaigns. In spite of these efforts, the fertility rate has remained low.
Over the past decades, the number of births has fallen significantly not just in the PRC, but also in other industrial centers in Asia. In 2024, they were among the countries with the lowest fertility rates worldwide: Japan 1.2, PRC 1.0, Taiwan 0.9, and South Korea 0.7. Fertility rates below 2.1 eventually lead to population decline and, with the exception of Israel, all OECD countries also have fertility rates below that replacement rate. The global working-age population is already declining, and the United Nations expects the world population to start declining in the second part of this century.9UNDESA, World Fertility 2024 (New York: United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division, 2025), un.org/development/desa/pd/sites/www.un.org.development.desa.pd/files/undesa_pd_2025_wfr_2024_final.pdf; OECD Family Database, The Structure of Families: Fertility Rates (2025), webfs.oecd.org/Els-com/Family_Database/SF_2_1_Fertility_rates.pdf; UNDESA, World Population Prospects 2024, World (United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division, 2025), population.un.org/wpp/graphs?loc=900&type=Demographic%20Profiles&category=Line%20Charts.
In the PRC, the population has recently fallen to 1.408 billion. If the current trend continues, it will fall below one billion by 2075 and to around 600 million by 2100—back to its population size in 1950. It is tempting to blame the one-child policy for the birth decline, but its actual impact is contested. Even in countries like India, which implemented less rigid population control measures and has replaced the PRC as the world’s most populous country by recently reaching 1.46 billion, the fertility rate has fallen from 3.7 to below 2 over the last thirty years.10UNDESA, World Population Prospects 2024, China (United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division, 2025), population.un.org/wpp/graphs?loc=156&type=Demographic%20Profiles&category=Line%20Charts; UNDESA, World Fertility 2024.
Outcome of Proletarianization
Whether in the PRC, India, or elsewhere, behind declining fertility rates lies a process that forms the basis of capitalist relations everywhere: the proletarianization of the rural population.11How the changing property relations and the dependency on wage labor led to a complex transformation of the family regime and changes in fertility rates, see, for instance, Wally Seccombe, A Millennium of Family Change. Feudalism to Capitalism in Northwestern Europe (London and New York: Verso, 1992). In order to understand this process, it is worth looking back to where and when capitalist relations originated.
Whether in the PRC, India, or elsewhere, behind declining fertility rates lies a process that forms the basis of capitalist relations everywhere: the proletarianization of the rural population. In order to understand this process, it is worth looking back to where and when capitalist relations originated.
In Northwestern Europe, the expansion of the cottage industry and home-based production reached a peak in the eighteenth century and was followed by the, often violent, separation of people from the means of production and their subsequent dependence on wage labor—that is, the process of proletarianization. Both developments led to intensified economic pressures and social misery for those affected.
Fertility increased with the rise in cottage industry and home-based production because family welfare no longer depended on having enough land, but on the number of children who could serve as workers.12Before the eighteenth century, fertility in many rural areas of Northwestern Europe was low in part because only firstborn sons who owned land married and had children. Moreover, these eldest sons did so relatively late in life (Wally Seccombe, “Marxism and Demography,” New Left Review 137 (1983): 22–47). In other areas, both fertility and mortality—especially infant mortality—were high, and life expectancy was generally low. As a result, the population usually grew only moderately, and during deadly crises such as the plague, population numbers even plummeted (Max Roser, “The Global Decline of the Fertility Rate,” Our World in Data, February 20, 2014, https://ourworldindata.org/global-decline-fertility-rate). During this early proletarianization phase, higher fertility rates well above mortality in protoindustrial towns led to a first surge of population growth.13Seccombe, “Marxism and Demography.” With increased mechanization and industrialization, people moved to urban slums where household and workplace were separated and men, women, and children worked in sweatshop factories. Subsequently, mortality increased and trended to offset higher fertility.14On the impact of harsh working and living conditions of proletarians and their high mortality in big cities, see Wally Seccombe, Weathering the Storm: Working-Class Families from the Industrial Revolution to the Fertility Decline, ch. 3 (London: Verso, 1993). The terrible living and working conditions of proletarians and their children seriously affected their health and were therefore unsustainable even for capital that needed capable workers it can exploit. Pressures for increased wages and improved housing, health care, and hygiene led to a decline in mortality—especially among children—and more people lived to the end of their reproductive years. These factors led to even faster population growth.15This corresponds with what Karl Marx called the surplus population which grew with the dependency on wage labor and the regular crises that produced unemployment. It includes workers whose labor power was (temporarily) not needed or who were no longer of any use for capital. See, for instance, Paul Cammack and Martha E. Gimenez, “The Permanent Global Crisis of Working-Class Social Reproduction: Ten Propositions,” Global Political Economy 4, no. 2 (2024): 104–19, doi.org/10.1332/26352257Y2024D000000025.
However, increasing proletarianization led to a long-term decline in fertility. In Northwestern Europe, women already gave birth to significantly fewer children in the late nineteenth century.16A detailed discussion on factors that led to the decline in proletarian fertility starting in the second part of the nineteenth century is provided in Seccombe, Weathering the Storm, ch. 5. On the decline in Germany, see John Knodel, The Decline of Fertility in Germany, 1871–1939 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974), doi.org/10.1515/9781400869848.With labor struggles and rising wages, proletarian families were less dependent on child labor, and they no longer needed children to the same extent to provide security in case of illness and old age.17 Some observers do not consider this to be an important reason, because, according to them, the support provided by children to their parents in old age was less significant than assumed, see, for instance Roser, “The Global Decline of the Fertility Rate.” After all, as proletarian parents did not own land or other property (nothing their children would eventually inherit), the latter were less inclined to care for their parents in contrast to peasant families with land property. This applied in particular to places where the state established social welfare systems. Compulsory schooling and the prohibition of child labor limited a family’s capacity to use their children’s work as a source of family income. Meanwhile, the costs of education and childcare rose significantly. Whether both parents or only the male “breadwinner” had to work to provide for their families, children had become a burden and poverty risk. Reproductive and unwaged “housework” had already been allocated to women with the separation of the household from the sphere of production, and women felt this rising burden.
Women’s capacity to decide against pregnancy and have fewer children increased with the spread of contraceptive techniques from the late nineteenth century onward. The proliferation of synthetic contraceptives after the 1960s and easier access to abortions amplified this trend.18Over time, access to contraceptives and abortions has increased women’s capacities of birth control in other world regions, too, accelerating the downward trend in fertility. At the same time, governments following racist, antiproletarian, or counterinsurgency programs have used contraceptives, abortions, and sterilizations for coercive population control measures to limit the number of childbirths of unwanted social groups. Patriarchal relationships inside and outside the family changed with the expansion of education for girls and of wage labor for women.19Roser, “The Global Decline of the Fertility Rate.” The waning influence of religion, the impact of emerging feminist movements, and the “normalization” of women with fewer or no children in public perception further enabled proletarian women to take more control over their lives. As a result, women could decide to get married later or not at all, and they succeeded in reducing the number of births.20The patriarchal family’s weakening through the empowerment of women had further consequences which cannot be discussed in detail here. For instance, the declining number of marriages left more people unmarried, leading to an increase in cases of isolation and loneliness. This social crisis has already reached African countries (Sarah Johnson, “The Loneliest Continent: Epidemic of Social Isolation Hits Africans as Western Culture Spreads,” Guardian, August 12, 2025, theguardian.com/global-development/2025/aug/12/africa-loneliest-continent-social-isolation-western-culture-technology-urbanisation-friendship). In some countries many old people die alone and without anyone noticing, known in Japan as kodokushi (Justin McCurry, “Life at the Heart of Japan’s Lonely Deaths Epidemic: ‘I Would Be Lying If I Said I Wasn’t Worried,’” Guardian, July 1, 2024, theguardian.com/world/article/2024/jul/01/life-at-the-heart-of-japans-solitary-deaths-epidemic-i-would-be-lying-if-i-said-i-wasnt-worried). And personal crises increase among girls and women but also among boys and men (Robert D. Putnam and Richard V. Reeves, “Boy Crisis of 2025, Meet the ‘Boy Problem’ of the 1900s,” New York Times, August 15, 2025, nytimes.com/2025/08/15/opinion/men-boys-crisis-progressive-era.html). This shows that the decline of the patriarchal family has led to problems that have not been solved because alternative social forms that guarantee community, care, and support for all have not been widely established yet. For a discussion on possible solutions, see, for instance, M. E. O’Brien, Family Abolition: Capitalism and the Communizing of Care (London: Pluto Press, 2023).
These processes initially took place in core capitalist countries in Europe and elsewhere, then accelerated in later industrialized states such as South Korea and China, and are now also occurring in countries such as India and Indonesia.21The decline in fertility has accelerated over the course of history. For example, it took ninety-five years (1815–1919) for the fertility rate to fall from six to three in the United Kingdom, but only ten years (1986–1996) for a similar decline in Iran (Roser, “The Global Decline of the Fertility Rate”). This is not to say that the conditions and consequences of fertility decline following proletarianization are identical around the globe. Regional differences—especially differing histories of colonization, racism, slavery, indentured labor, and forced labor, as well as the regional heritage of patriarchal rule—shaped both the proletarianization process (with its varied degrees of labor precarity and formalization) and the specific trajectory of the demographic transitions in each region.22These specific trajectories of the demographic transitions were further shaped over time by new technological developments that, for instance, impacted agricultural productivity, food safety, or the (non)treatment of contagious or chronic diseases in particular decades.
Still, despite vast differences in income, living conditions, and social inequality in countries of the “North” and the “South,” the time-delayed sequence of the surge and drop of fertility rates can be clearly seen in each region over the past 250 years, indicating an overall pattern of demographic development. The world population had grown slowly until the eighteenth century and increased rapidly thereafter, reaching over eight billion people today. However, it is already declining in a number of regions and, as mentioned, will decline overall before the end of this century.
Drawing an analogy to Karl Marx’s observation of the “tendency of the rate of profit to fall” (the decline of the ratio of surplus value to the amount of invested capital), economist Philip Pilkington links proletarianization and eventually declining fertility, speaking of the “tendency of the rate of people to fall” under capitalism.23Philip Pilkington, “Capitalism’s Overlooked Contradiction: Wealth and Demographic Decline,” American Affairs Journal VI, no. 4 (2022): 173–89, americanaffairsjournal.org/2022/11/capitalisms-overlooked-contradiction-wealth-and-demographic-decline. See also Paul Cammack, “The Political Economy of Post-Reproduction Society,” New Political Economy, September 10, 2025, doi.org/10.1080/13563467.2025.2555352. On Marx’s observation, see Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 3, ed. Friedrich Engels (marxists.org, 1999), Part III: The Law of the Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall, marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Capital-Volume-III.pdf. In other words, capitalism is based on the continued proletarianization and exploitation of labor power, while also creating conditions that hamper the reproduction of labor power and lead to shrinking labor reservoirs, eventually undermining its own existence.24Analogue to the countertendencies or countermeasures that limit or reverse the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, we can also identify countertendencies for the tendency of fertility rates to fall in capitalism, but whether they actually limit or reverse that tendency depends on when and how they are at play or used. For a discussion of the PRC case, see below. Where the aims to remedy the shortage of labor and to increase the production of surplus value concur, countermeasures that impact the tendency of the rate of profit to fall and those absorbing the impact of fertility decline can even overlap – such as the relocation of industries to areas with abundant “cheap” labor, or the recruitment of migrant labor with poorer conditions.
The PRC’s Crisis of Social Reproduction
In the PRC, the consequences of the fertility decline combine with other factors to amplify the crisis of social reproduction—a crisis that hits family households and the reproduction of labor power as well as capitalist institutions and the reproduction of the capitalist society.
In capitalism, the conditions under which the reproduction of labor power is managed in family households are always the result of struggles between capital and proletariat. Capital wants to maximize profits and therefore seeks to reduce wages and the costs of the reproduction of labor power as much as possible. It also wants to take advantage of as much unwaged reproductive labor as possible—labor that is mostly performed by women. Proletarians try to push back against the deterioration of their working and living conditions. Low wages, long working hours, the intensification of work, unemployment, welfare cuts, inflation: all these factors define the continuous precarity and crisis of social reproduction proletarians have to deal with.25On the continuity of the crisis of social reproduction of labor power, see, for instance, Cammack and Gimenez, “The Permanent Global Crisis of Working-Class Social Reproduction.”
In the PRC, the recent economic slowdown has led to further deteriorating conditions for migrant and other proletarian families. Due to the increased cost of living, most proletarian parents have to continue to work full-time (often in different cities). Many must work several jobs or do extensive overtime. Chinese time-use surveys show that the burden of unwaged reproductive work on women has recently increased even further.26Du Fenglian, Wang Wenbin, and Dong Xiaoyuan, Chinese People’s Time Use and Their Quality of Life: Research Report of Chinese Time Use Survey (Singapore: Springer, 2023); Du Fenglian and Zhao Yunxia, “Time Use among Urban Women in China at Different Income Levels,” Journal of Asian Economics 96 (February 2025): doi.org/10.1016/j.asieco.2024.101866.
Migrant and other proletarian families are finding it increasingly difficult to provide or arrange necessary care work. Since both parents often come from one-child families and women still do most of the (unwaged) reproductive labor, many middle-aged women have to care for two sets of grandparents in addition to their own child or children.27He Huifeng and Mandy Zuo, “How China’s ‘One-Child Generation’ Got Trapped in the Population Pyramid,” South China Morning Post, October 2, 2024, scmp.com/economy/china-economy/article/3280578/how-chinas-one-child-generation-got-trapped-population-pyramid. Middle-class families with sufficient resources continue to hire migrant domestic workers to provide care work. Proletarian families can hardly afford this. As a result, parents and children are stressed, arguments escalate, and domestic violence becomes more pervasive, leading to increasing divorce.28One year after the passing of the PRC’s Anti-Domestic Violence Law in 2015, almost 15 percent of divorce cases were filed due to domestic violence. See Xia Tian, “Why Divorcing an Abusive Spouse Remains an Uphill Struggle,” Sixth Tone, March 15, 2021, sixthtone.com/users/1006588/xia-tian.
The family—the “nucleus” of capitalist society and the place where labor power is (re)produced—is also the place where the conflicts over having (fewer) children and the unequal distribution of reproductive labor rages, both in concealed and open ways. Proletarian women, whose power has grown through wage labor participation and the partial breakdown of patriarchal family relations, are fighting back against their double burden of wage labor and unwaged domestic work and, especially, the enormous burden of raising children. They are also demanding more control over their lives.
Proletarian women, whose power has grown through wage labor participation and the partial breakdown of patriarchal family relations, are fighting back against their double burden of wage labor and unwaged domestic work and, especially, the enormous burden of raising children. They are also demanding more control over their lives.
In concrete terms, this has meant that many women in the PRC continued to have only one child or refused to give birth under these conditions—a form of birth strike that has persisted even after the abolition of the one-child policy in 2015.29This includes women of all social classes. Middle-class women with education and access to better jobs have higher opportunity costs (due to sacrificing, for instance, more life chances and higher paid working hours or pension entitlements) than proletarian women with less education. That is why they also decide against having (many) children. On the concept of birth strike, see Jenny Brown, Birth Strike: The Hidden Fight Over Women’s Work (Oakland: PM Press, 2019) and, in the PRC case, Ralf Ruckus, “Birth Strike against China’s Population Policies,” Naoqingchu, March 29, 2020, nqch.org/2020/03/29/birth-strike-against-chinas-population-policies. From 2010 to 2020, the average marriage age for women rose from 25 to 29, as younger women have prioritized their careers or other goals over starting a family.30“China’s Average Marriage Age Continues to Rise, Driven by Urbanization, Education,” Global Times, June 18, 2023, globaltimes.cn/page/202306/1292769.shtml; Barclay Bram, “The Last Generation: Why China’s Youth Are Deciding Against Having Children,” Asia Society, January 11, 2023,asiasociety.org/policy-institute/last-generation-why-chinas-youth-are-deciding-against-having-children. Called postponement transition, this process has been a factor in declining fertility rates in other countries as well. The annual number of marriages has declined significantly, while the number of divorces has increased.31Helen Davidson, “She Said No: Marriages in China Plummet to Record Low,” Guardian, February 12, 2025, theguardian.com/world/2025/feb/12/china-marriage-statistics-plummet-record-low; Lucille Liu, “China’s Low Marriage and Birth Rates Are an Economic Ticking Timebomb,” Bloomberg, May 11, 2025, bloomberg.com/news/features/2025-05-08/china-s-low-marriage-and-birth-rates-are-an-economic-ticking-timebomb; Lima Sun, “More Chinese Leave the Knot Untied as Marriage Registrations Drop,” South China Morning Post, April 28, 2025, scmp.com/economy/china-economy/article/3308173/more-chinese-leave-knot-untied-marriage-registrations-drop. It is important to mention that, in the PRC, it is still difficult for women to have children outside of marriage because the CCP regime does not allow children born outside marriage to join the state’s welfare system.
Undermining the PRC Economy
The crisis of social reproduction in the families, the declining number of births, and the ensuing shortage of new labor power threatens to undermine the mechanisms on which Chinese capitalism rests—the supply of “cheap” labor exploited in factories, construction, and services as well as the constant availability of unwaged reproductive labor. Since the 1980s, the supply of “cheap” labor has been largely guaranteed by young people and former agricultural laborers migrating from the PRC’s rural areas to find wage labor in cities and industrial zones. Most of these migrant workers had to keep their rural registration (hukou) and have thereby been denied access to certain urban welfare and services. To date, their number has grown to around 300 million.32Zhao Yimeng, “Around 300m Migrant Workers in China,” China Daily, May 20, 2025, chinadaily.com.cn/a/202505/20/WS682c743ba310a04af22c08c0.html.
Now, the reservoir of rural labor is rather depleted after more than three decades of rural-to-urban labor migration. The low numbers of births in the countryside added to this development. Without new and younger migrants, the average age of migrant workers has been rising. Equally important, today’s migrant labor is no longer as “cheap” as before. Migrant workers’ relatively low wages have so far been linked to their precarious status in the city and their low cost of reproduction—from raising children to caring for the elderly—in rural areas, where prices are lower and “left behind” or old women do the unwaged reproductive work. In other words, for a long time, companies and households did not have to pay wages that enabled migrant workers to permanently live in cities with their high(er) costs for food, housing, education, and health care. Today, however, migrant workers often stay in the city and bring their families there as well. In addition, prices in rural areas have also risen. Migrant workers therefore have pressed for higher wages and have become more “expensive” to hire.33Zhang Yanyin, Wei Yao, and Chen Liangxian, “Work in Progress: The Changing Face of China’s Migrant Workforce,” Sixth Tone, May 21, 2024, sixthtone.com/news/1015180; Hannah Schling, “Gender, Temporality, and the Reproduction of Labour Power: Women Migrant Workers in South China,” Sozial.Geschichte Online 14 (2014): 42–61, duepublico.uni-duisburg-essen.de/servlets/DerivateServlet/Derivate-37517/04_Schling_China.pdf; Michael Burawoy, “The Functions and Reproduction of Migrant Labor: Comparative Material from Southern Africa and the United States,” American Journal of Sociology 81, no. 5 (1976): 1050–87, doi.org/10.1086/226185; Xinhua, “China’s Migrant Workers See Steady Income Rise in 2024,” People’s Daily Online, May 1, 2025, en.people.cn/n3/2025/0501/c90000-20309992.html; Arendse Huld, “Average Salaries in China – Trends and Implications for Businesses,” China Briefing News, August 15, 2023, china-briefing.com/news/average-salaries-in-china-trends-and-implications-for-businesses.
The situation is aggravated by further lingering consequences of the one-child policy. Not only has the policy accelerated the demographic shift toward fewer births, it has also led to a surplus of more than thirty million men due to the sexist preference for male offspring. On the marriage market, the bride price that a groom’s family has to pay has risen significantly, causing many families to fall into debt. In addition, as a result of the demographic changes, the population is aging rapidly. The working-age population is already shrinking while the proportion of people of retirement age is increasing, driven not only by declining fertility rates but also by longer life expectancy.34Laura Silver and Christine Huang, “Key Facts about China’s Declining Population,” Pew Research Center, December 5, 2022, pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/12/05/key-facts-about-chinas-declining-population; “Bride Prices Are Surging in China: Why Is the Government Struggling to Curb Them?,” Economist, June 12, 2025, economist.com/china/2025/06/12/bride-prices-are-surging-in-china; Kanis Leung, “China’s Aging Population Fuels ‘Silver Economy’ Boom, but Profits Can Prove Elusive,” AP News, November 29, 2024, apnews.com/article/china-elderly-aging-population-silver-b81916bc8fea7b9f251ec8565941e692.
In the future, increasingly fewer young working-age people will have to provide the resources to care for more and more nonworking elderly. This is all the more serious given the absence of adequate state welfare systems. The social benefits granted during the socialist period—mostly only available to the urban population—were cut back in the 1990s and the social systems introduced during the capitalist period have remained underfunded, especially those for internal migrant workers. As the commodification of care work proceeds today and the private “silver economy” booms, commercial care services remain expensive, and the main burden of caring for the elderly and sick continues to fall on families.
A key problem for the CCP regime is the speed at which the problems worsen. The CCP regime has a limited window for adjustments and countermeasures if it wants to secure the further development of PRC capital and make the PRC the world’s leading super power.35The theme of adjustment and adaptation also bothers observers beyond the PRC. Some analysts downplay the effects of fertility decline for capitalism, see “Don’t Panic about the Global Fertility Crash: A World with Fewer People Would Not Be All Bad,” Economist, September 11, 2025, economist.com/leaders/2025/09/11/dont-panic-about-the-global-fertility-crash. Others are counting on sufficient time to adapt to the decline and its consequences, see Lynne Peeples, “People Are Having Fewer Babies: Is It Really the End of the World?,” Nature 644, no. 8077 (2025): 594–96, doi.org/10.1038/d41586-025-02615-6; OECD, OECD Employment Outlook 2025: Can We Get Through the Demographic Crunch? (Paris: OECD Publishing, 2025), oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/publications/reports/2025/07/oecd-employment-outlook-2025_5345f034/194a947b-en.pdf. A reversal in population trends would take decades. Labor shortages will therefore increase, and the demand for care work for the elderly will rise significantly.
Attempts to Stop the Trend
To mitigate the labor shortage, the CCP regime makes use of “countertendencies” to the “tendency of the rate of people to fall” that have also been central to government measures elsewhere. It promotes the automation of labor processes and replacement of living labor.36Meaghan Tobin and Keith Bradsher, “There Are More Robots Working in China Than the Rest of the World Combined,” New York Times, September 25, 2025, nytimes.com/2025/09/25/business/china-factory-robots.html. Stepped up automation in the Chinese manufacturing sector has already led to wage decline, intensification of work, increase in working hours, a decrease of formal jobs and an increase in contract labor, see Zhang Ziyue and Feng Qiyangfan, “How Does Automation Reshape the Labor Market: Evidence From China,” Review of Development Economics, July 10, 2025, doi.org/10.1111/rode.13263; Wei Xiahai, Xu Jiawei, and Cao Hui, “Production Automation Upgrades and the Mystery of Workers’ Overwork: Evidence from a Manufacturing Employer-Employee Matching Survey in China,” Journal of Asian Economics 91 (2024), doi.org/10.1016/j.asieco.2024.101711. At the same time, it is still unclear whether the PRC government will be able to increase productivity across the economy. After all, despite all efforts, productivity has been stagnating since the 2008 crisis, see Loren Brandt, John Litwack, Elitza Mileva, Wang Luhang, Zhang Yifan, and Zhao Luan, “China’s Productivity Slowdown and Future Growth Potential,” (Working Paper 9298, World Bank Group, Washington DC, 2020), documents1.worldbank.org/curated/en/839401593007627879/pdf/Chinas-Productivity-Slowdown-and-Future-Growth-Potential.pdf. It encourages PRC companies to relocate factories abroad so that they can access “cheap” labor there. It also plans to raise the retirement age in order to slow down the effects of the aging of society. All these measures are intended to provide relief, but do not solve the underlying problems.37BYD Aims to Double Overseas Sales to 800,000 in 2025, Chairman Tells Analysts,” Reuters, March 26, 2025, reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/byd-aims-double-overseas-sales-800000-2025-chairman-tells-analysts-2025-03-26; Ding Wenjie and Joe Leahy, “China to Raise Retirement Age for First Time since 1978,” Financial Times, September 13, 2024; “Raising Retirement Age a Proactive Response to Population Aging,” Xinhua, September 14, 2024, english.news.cn/20240914/65d3d69c9e6a4cf89dbee6a063db65f5/c.html.
The CCP regime could also recruit foreign “guest workers,” as the governments of other capitalist countries have recurrently done to counter labor shortages. However, apart from a few experiments, it is not yet prepared to do so.38While, unofficially, relatively small numbers of foreign migrant workers have been working in the PRC for years, for instance, in factories and domestic care, the CCP regime has recently also allowed experiments with official temporary employment of foreign workers, for example, at the border to Vietnam. See Tabitha Speelman, “Guest Workers and Development – Security Conflict: Managing Labour Migration at the Sino-Vietnamese Border,” China Information 36, no. 3 (2022): 363–84, doi.org/10.1177/0920203X221098546. For the CCP regime, large-scale immigration of foreign workers would risk provoking social conflicts in a situation of economic stagnation and social dissatisfaction among local workers. And whether it could find enough foreign migrants for the vast PRC labor market remains an open question.
A noticeable improvement in conditions for women that would make them decide to have children is also unlikely, despite the announced childcare subsidy and improved maternity leave.39Even in countries where significantly higher resources have been mobilized to increase the fertility rate, this has hardly been achieved. See “Can the Rich World Escape Its Baby Crisis?,” Economist, December 21, 2024, economist.com/finance-and-economics/2024/05/21/can-the-rich-world-escape-its-baby-crisis; Pilkington, “Capitalism’s Overlooked Contradiction.” The government will probably have to continue raising social spending, but is hardly in a position to finance a significant increase given the economic downturn and overall debt.40In the fall of 2025, the economic crisis in the PRC is evident in rising youth unemployment, long-lasting deflation, growth slowdown, and fears that a ruling by the highest court in August that employers and employees are not allowed to waive social insurance contributions might lead to the reduction of workforces, declining disposable wages, and lower consumption. See, for instance, “China Job Market Woes Spread at Worst Time for Deflation Fight,” Bloomberg, September 22, 2025, bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-09-22/china-s-labor-distress-spreads-at-worst-time-for-deflation-fight; “China Sees Backlash Over Mandatory Social Security Payments,” Bloomberg, August 13, 2025, bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-08-13/china-torn-by-anxiety-and-panic-after-social-security-verdict.
This leaves the government the option to use natalist measures. It has run campaigns that include the screening of women’s procreative capacities and direct contacting to encourage young women to marry earlier and have more children. It has made divorce more difficult by law, and it introduced upper limits on bride prices in order to lower the barriers for marriage. The CCP’s almost exclusively male leaders have also promoted a “traditional” role for women in the family because they believe this will lead to more children.41Arthur Kaufman, “As Marriage Registrations Drop, Local Officials Text Women: ‘How Has Your Period Been Recently?,’” China Digital Times, May 1, 2025, chinadigitaltimes.net/2025/04/as-marriage-registrations-drop-local-officials-text-women-how-has-your-period-been-recently; Eleanor Olcott, Liu Nian, and Xueqiao Wang, “China Steps up Campaign for Single People to Date, Marry and Give Birth,” Financial Times, December 25, 2024, ft.com/content/5fdf42e1-2975-4c99-9031-a9f73c2251be; Vivian Wang, “So, Are You Pregnant Yet? China’s In-Your-Face Push for More Babies,” New York Times, October 8, 2024, nytimes.com/2024/10/08/world/asia/china-women-children-abortions.html; Huang Yage, “Barriers to Justice: Women’s Struggle for Divorce Rights in China,” Human Rights Research Center, May 15, 2025, humanrightsresearch.org/post/barriers-to-justice-women-s-struggle-for-divorce-rights-in-china; “Bride Prices Are Surging in China”; Alexandra Stevenson, “China’s Male Leaders Signal to Women That Their Place Is in the Home,” New York Times, November 2, 2023, nytimes.com/2023/11/02/world/asia/china-communist-party-xi-women.html; “Xi Calls for Fully Leveraging the Strength of Women,” People’s Daily Online, October 31, 2023, https://en.people.cn/n3/2023/1031/c90000-20091095.html.
However, it is obvious that most women in the PRC do not want to “return to the kitchen.” This is especially true of young women who not only have rejected the demand for more children since the 2010s, but who have also opposed sexism and even challenged the institution of marriage.42For a detailed account of women’s resistance and feminism in the PRC in the 2010s, see Angela Xiao Wu and Dong Yige, “What Is Made-in-China Feminism(s)? Gender Discontent and Class Friction in Post-Socialist China,” Critical Asian Studies 51, no. 4 (2019): 471–92, doi.org/10.1080/14672715.2019.1656538. This is reflected both in social media mobilizations responding to cases of sexual harassment and domestic violence and the popularity of literature advocating feminist positions or women’s life plans without marriage or children.43It is important to note that the “birth strike” is part of the resistance and resilience of, in particular, young people in the PRC who rebel against the effects of social crises and find expression in other forms of refusal and rage against the dashed hopes for improvements, against the constant pressure to work and compete, and against capitalist exploitation and social inequality more generally. For examples, see Dino Ge Zhang, “On Sinopessimism, or Junkies of Futility,” Made in China Journal, August 5, 2025, madeinchinajournal.com/2025/08/05/on-sinopessimism-or-junkies-of-futility; Ryan Woo and Ethan Wang, “China’s Rising Youth Unemployment Breeds New Working Class: ‘Rotten-Tail Kids,’” Reuters, August 21, 2024, reuters.com/world/china/rotten-tail-kids-chinas-rising-youth-unemployment-breeds-new-working-class-2024-08-21. While the government makes limited concessions, such as passing laws that intend to punish sexual harassment and domestic violence, it simultaneously censors feminist content, orchestrates the antifeminist backlash on social media, and combats political feminism through arrests and punishments. Many feminists have had to leave the country as a result.
It remains to be seen whether the CCP regime will be able to prevail against feminist mobilizations and persuade women to have more children. Ultimately, two factors will continue to determine the number of children born: the future “cost” of raising children, and the future extent of women’s power to decide whether to have children or not. The CCP leaders will hardly be able to halt the “tendency of the rate of people to fall” in capitalism. And for Chinese capitalism, the crisis of fertility and social reproduction could prove even more dangerous than debt problems, economic fluctuations, or geopolitical confrontations.
Instead of Solutions
To be entirely clear, low fertility rates and ensuing labor shortages—in both the PRC and elsewhere—are a problem of the capitalist class, not the proletariat. However, the increased economic pressures caused by the crisis of social reproduction and the disruptive effects of capitalist exploitation are affecting all proletarians and, in particular, women: those who have children and those who do not. It will lead to further hardship, resistance, and struggles.
The measures already used by the CCP regime as well as capitalists and governments in other countries to counter fertility decline and labor shortages will likely even increase these pressures:44The OECD, concerned that the “demographic crunch” will harm the economic perspectives of its member states, focuses on the full mobilization for wage labor of remaining groups that are not yet in employment—young people, women, migrants, older workers—in other words, it counts on the exploitation of the maximum number of existing proletarians. See OECD, OECD Employment Outlook 2025: Can We Get Through the Demographic Crunch?
- The replacement of living labor through automation (including the usage of AI) will undermine the livelihood of many workers and lead to the deskilling of remaining jobs.
- The relocation of production will be used by capital to further lower wages and deteriorate working conditions.
- Raising the pension age means forcing workers who have already wasted many years for the benefit of capitalists to continue doing exploitative jobs.
- Meanwhile, governments will try to lower welfare for pensioners and increase taxes and social insurance contributions from younger workers in order to make up for the increased proportion of pensioners to working-age people.
- Filling jobs through migration means relying on more workers who have to move away from their home regions due to the pressures of poverty, war, or patriarchal violence. These workers continue to be racialized in the receiving countries and face intense exploitation in devalued, dirty, and dangerous jobs.
- Natalist policies that push women to have more children—whether in the form of material incentives, ideological pressure, or coercive measures—reinforce patriarchal hierarchies and the sexist division of labor.
In other words, proletarians (both with and without jobs), pensioners, migrants, and women might all face deteriorating conditions and increased suffering so that the capitalist class can overcome the fertility crisis and ensure a constant labor supply—unless they continue to refuse collaboration and strike back.
Within the conflict about fertility, women’s and feminist resistance against natalist polices will be crucial. This is the case in the PRC, but also in the United States and other countries where governments have implemented natalist polices and where rightwing movements push for “traditional” gender roles and more nonmigrant births.
As long as proletarianization, exploitation, economic crises, and patriarchal structures define the environment in which children are born, women will use their position and power in the family and beyond—as constrained as it might be—to limit the pressure and misery that comes with giving birth. This material base for resistance also puts into question calls for countering the “crisis of faith in the future” that allegedly stops Chinese young people from having children. And it challenges promoters of a “progressive” natalism in the United States or the United Kingdom that want to persuade people—especially, “left-leaning” women and their partners—to have more children. No call for faith in the future, no argument for more children for “progressives,” no focus on a desire for motherhood or other individualistic strategies will turn the direction of fertility rates. Rather, the struggle against capitalist relations and for the improvement of conditions for proletarians will give women more space and resources to decide on having (more) children—or not. And that means, for the time being, they will continue to have fewer children than capital wants them to have. Women in the PRC have shown the way.