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Population is one of the necessary factors in the formation of a nation, and at the same time it is the main body that constitutes society. It is precisely because of the existence of man that social life can exist.
After 2021, people have discussed the trend of population change in china today and some related issues and phenomena, and among the many social issues that people care about, population-related issues can be said to be a "hot spot".
Relevant data
It's already clear about population figures for 2021 and trends in recent years: in 2021, the continent's birth rate will reach its lowest level since the 1960s.
In terms of the number of new people, the number of newborns in the whole year is only 480,000 more than the number of deaths, which almost indicates that the number of people who have increased is infinitely close to the number of deaths; the birth rate is only 7.52 ‰, down 1.00 thousand points from 2020; the natural population growth rate is 0.34 ‰, down 1.11 thousand points from 2020.
All in all, the current population growth rate of the mainland has reached a very slow point, and even some experts say that the era of "negative population growth" has arrived.
According to the data given by the National Development and Reform Commission, the emergence of population growth problems is mainly due to the continuous decline in the birth population, and there are two main reasons for this problem: the first is that the number of women of childbearing age continues to decrease, in 2021, the number of women of childbearing age aged 15-49 in the mainland has decreased by about 5 million compared with 2020, of which 21-35 years old women of childbearing age have decreased by about 3 million; secondly, because the fertility level is also declining, this is because people's concept of childbearing, The existence of situations such as an increase in the age of first marriage and childbearing.
The data generally reflects a theme of "fertility difficulties", and the relevant information is also multifaceted. For us, data has become a foregone conclusion and is difficult to change, but the conceptual factors that lead to data generation are worth thinking about.
Procreation: The "Conundrum" After Marriage
In traditional Chinese culture, love, marriage, family, and procreation can be said to be a sequence of life in sequence, and often only after going through the previous stage can we enter the later stage.
As the famous British anthropologist Victor Witter Turner put it in The Ritual Process, in the process of passing through the ritual, people often experience a threefold change in identity: preparation, intermingling, and passing.
In short, for everyone, there will be a similar situation in life: from a single individual, to preparing to become a "not alone person", and finally successfully achieving a transformation from a "natural person" to a "social person". In this process, marriage and procreation are the "only way" for individuals.
Especially fertility, for today's young people, childbirth seems to be always a "distant" thing. The reason why people have such an idea is, on the one hand, because the material living standards of the whole society are improving, and people's livelihood methods are no longer the traditional small-scale peasant economy, and they do not have to rely on fertility to bring labor to the family, so people's childbearing age is generally delayed.
On the other hand, today's society for the ability of individuals to increase the requirements, the so-called "starting a family before establishing a business", want to get a good career, to provide themselves with the most basic economic life security, often need a certain degree or social experience accumulation.
For today's people, the average undergraduate graduation age is already around 23 years old, master's degree graduates will be 25 or 26 years old, and doctoral graduates have mostly reached the age of establishment.
So from this point of view, leaving aside people's desire to procreate, even if you want to establish the conditions to have children, it will often be around the age of 25, and the age of childbearing is understandable.
But amid the strong impact of the social status quo and traditional ideas, the necessity of childbearing seems to still exist.
Fertility costs: "dissuading many people"
So since the act of childbearing itself is still more necessary - traditional concepts, family survival, old-age security, then why do people still have such resistance to the "birth of children"?
This has to say about the cost of childbearing: to raise a child today, it takes a couple, or even two families, to put a lot of energy and financial resources to achieve, which is difficult for many families with a relatively ordinary economic level to accept.
According to the results of the national birth status sampling survey conducted by the former National Health and Family Planning Commission in 2017, the top three factors affecting the willingness of women of childbearing age to have children are "economic burden", "age hidden danger" and "unattended children", with the influencing factors accounting for 77.4%, 45.6% and 33.2% respectively.
From this set of data, we can find that at least the biggest factor affecting women's willingness to have children is economic pressure, so for men, economic pressure is bound to have the same impact.
So how much does it cost to raise a child as an adult? The data shows that the average cost of raising children aged 0-17 in the country is 485,000 yuan; the average cost of raising children from 0 to university is 627,000 yuan.
For comparison, as of 2019, the per capita consumption expenditure of mainland residents is 21,559 yuan, the per capita consumption expenditure of urban residents is 28,063 yuan, and the per capita consumption expenditure of rural residents is 13,328 yuan.
In short, for a family, raising a child to adulthood is basically equivalent to the entire disposable income of the entire family for more than two decades. This means that for the whole family, its living standards are bound to be greatly reduced.
In today's society, people's consumption concepts are affected by factors such as globalization and consumerism, and it is not uncommon to consume ahead and enjoy consumption, coupled with the inevitable need to buy a house with a mortgage to buy a house, and the perennial mortgage and car loan make many young people bear debt as soon as they work.
For young people at this time, not only economic pressure, but also encounter the problem of fertility, in contrast, there will be many people who choose not to have children for the time being, wait until the economic pressure is less, life has improved before giving birth; or simply choose to become a "Dink family", the interest is placed on the quality of life of two people.
It is precisely because of this that some netizens said that today's high housing prices are tantamount to a "contraceptive pill", so that many couples of childbearing age want to have children but do not have children.
It is true that today's population problem has become a very significant social problem, which has an impact on every individual: whether it is "negative population growth" or aging, once it occurs, it endangers the entire society. Therefore, for young people, while being rational, they may wish to think about the countermeasures that are suitable for themselves.
- The End -
Author | Tommy
Edit | Rain
The First Psychological Writing Group | A group of young people who like to look up at the stars
参考资料：Bruk, A., Scholl, S. G., & Bless, H. (2018). Beautiful mess effect: Self–other differences in evaluation of showing vulnerability. Journal of personality and social psychology, 115(2), 192-205
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