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Public or private?
A few days ago, Ren Zeping, an internet celebrity economist, said that he would print two trillion yuan and introduce a fund to encourage fertility, "50 million more children in 10 years." We must also seize the fertility window of the 75-85-year-old population, and don't count on the post-90s and post-00s." There have also been many articles that comment on responses from various angles such as fiscal and taxation perspectives, corporate costs, and middle-class rational people. I looked at it, and most of these comments were written by men.
As a post-80s, a mother of a child, I feel creepy. Men are too self-righteous in the matter of having children, talking about the state, politics, economy, rationality... With this effort, can't they make a good meal for the family? Can't accompany your child to help with homework? As a father, if you can accompany your children to grow up; if you are a husband, if you can be more sympathetic to your wife's efforts; if you are a son, if you can understand the hardships of the elderly with your grandchildren, instead of feeling that everything should be taken for granted, you will only write a small essay to point out the country. Then women will be more willing to have children.
If childbearing were as simple as writing a small essay, the fertility rate would not fall below 1%.
When men rise to various grand levels to discuss how to stimulate fertility and what kind of policies to introduce, they become researchers, commentators, and experts, using public discourse floodingly, using God's perspective, authoritative and arrogant tone, telling women of childbearing age: Let's have children, stimulate the economy need children, and national rejuvenation needs children.
But they forget that "procreation" is not only a public topic, but also a private issue. On the issue of fertility, there is a great deal of disagreement between men and women. Men are more inclined to treat having children as a grand public topic, and they prefer to discuss it from an economic and political point of view; while women are more willing to treat having children as a private issue, and we are more concerned about the specific contradictions between fertility and life and work than political economy.
When these male "experts", "researchers", and "commentators" make various fertility suggestions, wives and children seem to be just a symbol, a number. It's all about God's perspective, no empathy. The result will naturally be ridiculed by the crowd.
In fact, think about these "experts"? In life, many husbands do not write small essays, and they are also like supervisors and commentators: the food is too salty, the clothes are not washed, and how can the child be sick again? It seems that life has nothing to do with them, they only "occasionally participate", focusing on "commenting" and "supervising".
They may have read Dostoevsky. Dostoevsky said: Love concrete people, do not love abstract people, love life, do not love the meaning of life. But these husbands just forget that they love abstraction, symbols, and meaning more than concrete people and life.
The family is the guarantee of fertility
Although fertility is a string of numbers, fertility is the sum of a series of trivialities in life. Behind each number, there are countless families' helplessness, bitterness and trade-offs.
In 2020, China's birth rate fell below 1%, a new low in 43 years. The decline has reached 20% to 30% from January to September, and the number of births in November and December has decreased by more than 45% compared with the same period in 2015 due to the impact of the epidemic. The new crown epidemic and the wave of unemployment have made people's sense of uncertainty more intense, some people do not want to have children, some people dare not give birth.
Because it is often circulated in Shanghai, Suzhou and Hangzhou, as far as my own observations are concerned, there are still many families with two or even three children. They have the following characteristics: most of them are from Suzhou, Hangzhou, Shanghai or from the surrounding wealthy counties and cities, there is very little work in the system 996, the family buys a house early and the loan is relatively small, and the parents of both husband and wife are healthy and willing to help bring their children.
It is precisely because of the low work intensity, less loan pressure, and closer relationships with parents and friends, people's happiness index is higher, the sense of security is stronger, they will be more willing to have children, and the relaxed mentality is easier to conceive. I even have an almost extreme view: whether to have a second child or a third child is not only decided by the parents, but also by the grandparents.
Why? In my observation, families that have the ability to have two or three children have a strong and powerful "big family" behind them, and this family may have a strong grandfather, a grandmother who can help, parents who work decently without 996, and even seven aunts and eight aunts who are closely related. Strong family cohesion has enhanced the ability to resist risks, so that people have no worries and dare to live and dare to raise.
Taking the Chaoshan region of Guangdong Province, which has a high birth rate , as an example (which has also fallen seriously in recent years), Chaoshan has a very strong "fertility culture". Some experts have analyzed the historical reasons behind it - Chaoshan was once the place where democracy in the Central Plains was exiled. Because of the influx of a large number of displaced people, in order to compete for living space, a clan group linked by blood relations was established to jointly resist foreign enemies. The strong clan culture has made the Chaoshan people attach great importance to the inheritance of heirs, and gradually formed the concept of "many children and many blessings" and "giving birth to children must have men".
Not only Chaoshan but also Guangdong people generally attach importance to the family inheritance network, relatives of the same ethnic group will also help take care of and support children, and the family is an important guarantee for the family to want to live and dare to have children. Young people who grow up in the context of intergenerational inheritance will have higher fertility willingness and fertility levels than the only children of other provinces and cities.
However, in recent years, the birth rates of chaoshan, Wenzhou, Hefei and other cities that once had high fertility rates have also declined. The decline in the birth rate is trendy, and it may be better in local areas, but the trend is difficult to reverse. The decline in the birth rate is inextricably linked to our "great urbanization" in recent years.
Large urbanization and low fertility
Suzhou and Hangzhou, where I lived in the early years, were actually still a society of acquaintances, paying attention to the relationship between relatives and distances. However, in recent years, the process of large urbanization has accelerated the disintegration of acquaintance society and family clans. Society enters "atomization." The blood connection between people and people is thin and indifferent, the family is getting smaller and larger, the ability to resist risks is low, everyone's insecurity is aggravated, and the willingness to have children is naturally reduced.
At the same time, high housing prices, long commutes and high technology in big cities are all natural contraceptives.
High housing prices have raised the cost of living, and the house is not enough to live in, so naturally dare not have more children. It is also impossible to take parents to live with them to help with children, which reduces the willingness to have children. The high housing prices made 996 work hard and had to move to the suburbs for cheaper house prices, resulting in excessive commutes.
Excessive commuting time will also make people live under stress and pressure, and they will naturally be reluctant to have children for a long time.
According to a "Monitoring Report on Commuting Time consumption in Major Cities Across the Country", the average commuting time in 36 major cities across the country is 36 minutes in terms of one-way commuting time. Among them, Beijing's 47-minute ultra-long commute occupies the top spot, followed by Shanghai and Chongqing, whose commuting time consumption exceeds 40 minutes, which are the three cities with the longest commuting time in the country.
In 4 megacities and 10 megacities, on average, 1 in 7 people is an army of "extreme commuters" who take more than 60 minutes each way. They may live in Yanjiao, Huaqiao, Dongguan, and rush to the city center 30 kilometers or 50 kilometers away every day. This army is so numerous that in Beijing and Shanghai alone, such an extreme commuter population exceeds one million.
Some time ago, some experts were ridiculed by the group for expressing the opinion "Don't spend too much time on commuting". Experts are also right, time should be used to improve yourself. But now job opportunities are concentrated in the cbd of the city center, and the house prices and rents in these areas are out of reach, and it is helpless to move to the suburbs. The separation of work and residence, such as "sleeping in the flower bridge and dreaming in the magic capital", is a choice that people are forced to choose.
The report also shows that "25-34-year-olds" workers are the main force in long commutes. These people are also the main force of fertility that is spawned every day, just think, work 8-9 hours a day, commute to spend 2 hours, where is the time and energy to fall in love, have a baby? Not to mention a series of time-consuming parenting tasks such as picking up and dropping off children and accompanying homework.
In addition to high housing prices and long commutes, high technology is also a good contraceptive for people.
An economist at Cambridge University once pointed out that automatic washing machines are more innovative than the Internet, which is that automated electrical appliances represented by washing machines, pipeline gas, and microwave ovens liberate women from housework and move towards society and the workplace. The invention of household appliances such as washing machines is in the aftermath of World War II, the development of industrialization has accelerated, and many young and middle-aged male laborers have been killed or injured during World War II. The advent of home appliances has prompted women to participate in labor and get paid in the same way as men, not just as an appendage to men. Beauvoir's "The Second Sex" also sold well in Europe and the United States during this period, evoking the awakening of women.
Today's technology has long moved from "automatic" to "intelligent", and virtual and reality are increasingly inseparable. Not to mention that people are speculating in the "meta-universe", buying simulated sex robots, indulging in virtual games, etc., earlier there was a sixty-year-old aunt and the fake Jin Dong on Douyin talked about love.... In the high-tech "spoiling", our minds have also changed - more and more accustomed to being "algorithms" pushing preferences, growing in "games", getting satisfaction in "likes", and every adult has become a child "spoiled" by the Internet. Everyone only looks at what they want to see, listens to what they are willing to listen to, becomes more and more narcissistic, more and more narrow, and over time can not tolerate different people and different things. People live in Universe 25, lonely and narcissistic in a beautiful utopia.
This leads to marriage and loneliness; procreation, but widowhood. Not to mention the willingness to have children, the willingness to marry will be reduced.
From "Instrumental Rationality" to "Value Rationality"
Declining fertility is a global phenomenon, with the total fertility rate in the United States in 2020 at 1,637.5 children per 1,000 women, down 4 percent from 2019 and a record low.
In addition, research by the Institute for Health Indicator Evaluation at the University of Washington in the United States shows that the global fertility rate has nearly halved to 2.4 by 2017. In July 2020, researchers at the University of Washington published a study in the academic journal The Lancet predicted that in 2100, the global fertility rate will fall to 1.7, 183 of the world's 195 countries will fall below 2.1, and most countries will experience population contraction. It's just that our process seems to be a little faster.
Big cities are natural contraceptives, but the process of big cities is irreversible, and we can't go back to the era of small cities like "Jiangcun". Big cities are the field of personal struggle, but there will also be people who are tired, quit, return to their hometowns, come to the third and fourth lines, and live their own small lives in a down-to-earth manner. Regardless of the big city or small city, people are at ease, naturally live and work in peace and contentment, and spread their branches and leaves.
As a woman, I feel that stimulus policies are only one aspect, and the effectiveness of policies should not be overestimated too much, because these policies are often "instrumental rationality", not "value rationality".
Previously, Liang Jianzhang proposed to give birth to a baby to give a million, and now Ren Zeping said to print and distribute two trillion. This kind of instrumental rationality makes people pursue utilitarian results too much, only to quickly achieve the expected purpose, from the perspective of maximizing the effect, but ignoring people's emotional experience and spiritual value.
But procreation is not instrumental rationality, but a "value rationality" thing. Value rationality requires good motives and correct means, which are more long-term and more valuable.
Fei Xiaotong once said that our reproductive system is to harm ourselves and others. Especially for us women, the essence of procreation is an "altruistic act" - the hardship of pregnancy, the pain of menstruation, the trouble of breastfeeding, each of which is "self-harming".
If this is the case, why should we go to "harm others"? Ten months pregnant, deformed, contributed half of the genes, but not even their surname. If we were to think like these experts and use "instrumental rationality", we should not have children.
But we still hurt ourselves. Not because of how great it is, but because of love and instinct. It is love and instinct that make us endure hard and severe pain, do not care about the child's surname, do not care about the decay of appearance and body, it is love and instinct that make us mothers and become a real person.
But the current global trend seems to make people abandon love and instinct, everyone can hide in their own "meta-universe", flood of technology, excessive individualism, too dependent on online life, so that people's lives are more virtual. Farther and farther away from the real life, how can it be born?
Fertility problems need to be guided and encouraged by macro policies, but in the end it is still personal choice and effort. When the media focuses on women of childbearing age, they do not know that the roles of husbands and fathers are equally important.
If a little more husbands and fathers put down the "Perspective of God", give up "instrumental rationality", do not be "commentators" and "supervisors", but use easy eyes, practical hands and feet, and warm words to walk into the daily small things and into the trivialities of life. More companionship, mutual help, warmth and steadfastness, so that everyone dares to be born and dare to raise.
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