A Chinese tour guide and cultural shifts on birth rates

She is dressed in designer jeans and a smart jacket. Our guide — I’ll call her Ling — in Chongqing, China, has a degree in English from one of the city’s 20 universities.

Chongqing is a vast, sprawling, teeming urban area, purportedly the largest city in the world population-wise at more than 32 million, though its municipal boundaries encompass an area the size of Austria.

She’ll turn 35 later this year and says she is a “happy girl” enjoying her life and career, where she interacts with English-speaking tourists like me and the group I am with from all over the world.

She married two years ago and her husband is in IT. They both work long hours and each owned their own flat when they married with manageable mortgages and, overall, a modest cost of living. Life is good, especially for a young woman who was born in a village where her parents farmed.

She admits there is pressure from her mother to have a child. She deflects. “I tell her to talk to my younger brother,” who also married two years ago.

She is clear she does not want the “burden” of a baby now. Children are expensive. She is happy and enjoying her life. Perhaps in the future, but just one.

All indications are that her attitude is common in China, exacerbated by a high youth unemployment rate and the continuing impact of the one-child policy that ended in 2015. Counterintuitively, China’s birth rate has fallen from around 1.5 to just over one child per woman since the policy ended. To maintain a population, the rate needs to be around 2.1.

Demographers project that by the end of this century, China’s population, which has declined in each of the last three years, could fall from 1.4 billion to under 800 million. Local governments are starting to offer monetary inducements to women to have more children. They are not alone.

Hungary has offered packages of up to $35,000 for a child and no income tax for life if you have four children, but, after a brief tick upward, its birth rate has fallen from about 1.6 to 1.38. There are myriad reasons, but research has suggested that the declines have been particularly steep in patriarchal societies.

Compared to the cost of raising a child, which is easily hundreds of thousands of dollars, these inducements are small beer.

Consider Sweden. It has generous paid maternity leave (80% salary for up to 480 days), subsidized child care, universal health care and free education through university. The birth rate? Just over 1.5 in 2023.

The United States is not immune. Its birth rate is falling and was 1.6 in 2023, but we have maintained a growing population because of immigration, something that has not occurred in China.

There are so-called “pro-natalists” in the Trump administration who want to see American women have more children. Ideas are being kicked around. Perhaps a $5,000 grant to women who have a child. A medal for having six (honest).

However, something has changed in wealthier societies. A 2023 Pew poll found that only 45% of young American women expressed an interest in having a child compared with 57% of men.

Of course, no one in the current administration will be proposing the Swedish model. Au contraire. Medicaid and Head Start (the child care program) are on the chopping block. And economic uncertainty and rising prices are never helpful when making the momentous decision to have a child.

That said, unlike China, there are still large numbers of potential immigrants who want to come to America and will keep our population stable, if not growing.

Oh yeah … perhaps not.

• Keith Peterson, of Lake Barrington, served 29 years as a press and cultural officer for the United States Information Agency and Department of State. He was chief editorial writer of the Daily Herald 1984-86. His book “American Dreams: The Story of the Cyprus Fulbright Commission” is available from Amazon.com.