I hope so, in part because I’m in this situation. I live in China and my wife is Chinese, we want to have just one kid but I just don’t see how it’s going to be possible. And to be honest, I think to get much real progress it’s going to take some real fundamental, big changes. It’s not just the cost of raising a kid specifically that makes it so hard, it’s a lot of the other costs of everything.

We are actually making quite a bit compared to the average around us (we live in central China) but I’m really struggling to find a way to make it work well. Obviously we could just have a kid but it’s a lot more than that.

For one, education, even public education, is not free in China. College is cheap (but there are some major problems with that too, but they’re different) but K-12 is very much not. Then cheaper public schools, while still costing a lot, are very bad. Like, 50+ kids to a classroom, very poor outcomes, and with the gaokao if you send your kid to one of those schools they just have everything stacked against them. My nephew has basically been put through the ringer here, and his life honestly is very hard but he’s in a position where it doesn’t seem like he really has a way to get out of it to anything better. He hasn’t gotten a good education, I know his school and his teachers, I have a background in education (an MEd). Most of the teachers at his school will only half teach a kid unless the parents pay the teacher for “extra tutoring.” They have been cutting down on the extra tutoring, but only really private tutoring centers. In practice, that’s just not even most of it. There’s a way out of it in China, going to college abroad. That’s, obviously, only an option for the wealthy.

He’s going to hopefully become a welder, but those kinda manufacturing or manual labor jobs pay absolutely nothing in China. Going to college is practically the minimum to do well here.

Then, just living has become so expensive in China for most people. There is a huge gap between the rich and the poor here, where I am most people around me make 2 to 3,000rmb a month. Then very few people make slightly above that, then you got the group making 10x+ that. I think it’s about half the population who makes below 2,000rmb a month last I saw? That’s really not a lot, food prices over the last few years have just been unstable, like for a while pork was so expensive that people had to cut it out, and the rest of the food price always follows pork price in China.

Then there are the social expectations for marriage. People still do this but it drains you, then how can you have a kid? The main thing, to get married the husband has to own a house, it’s just a rule that’s true for probably 99% of men here. The housing market just kept going up which was good in some sense because that’s practically the only safe thing people can invest in here but it also made it harder and harder for people to get married. Now, it’s coming down, but that means suddenly people are losing their investment. It’s not just rich people investing in property since every guy has to own a house, it’s really the main thing people in China put their money into. That and the majority of the local government’s get their money from owning and leasing property, too. Like seriously a massive amount of whole cities is entirely tied up in property values. So, that’s gonna put some stress on some things.

When we went back to my inlaws for CNY, basically get to hear all the village gossip cuz that’s sorta what you do on CNY, since everyones going around house to house to bow to the older people. People are pissed, and worried, they’re not as optimistic that the government is actually doing anything. Like, this is not the first time the government has made a big show of doing something and then it all had no practical effect, because half the more local officials are only concerned with looking like they’re doing stuff, and not with solving actual problems, and that’s how it usually works, Beijing will make general demands “we need to work on x” and the implementation is up to the provinces or cities, those officials will just try whatever to make sure they’re seen as “working on x” even if it doesn’t actually help. Which, honestly? That’s what that article looks like it’s about. At least all my wife’s friends keep saying they’re not planning on having kids because it doesn’t make sense in all this, it’s unaffordable.

Peanut butter, mayo, dill pickle sandwich. Might not be too rare, I’ve met a few other people who eat variations of this but damn is it good.

You gotta watch out though cuz all that mayo will sneak up on you.