[As the Chinese government tries to
increase the country’s falling birthrate, some millennials are striving for a
lifestyle commonly known as “Double Income, No Kids.”]
By Sui-Lee Wee and Elsie Chen
So, at the age of 26, he had a
vasectomy.
“For our generation, children
aren’t a necessity,” said Mr. Huang, a bachelor in the southern Chinese city of
Guangzhou. “Now we can live without any burdens. So why not invest our
spiritual and economic resources on our own lives?”
Mr. Huang, 27, is striving for a
lifestyle known as “Double Income, No Kids,” or DINK. The acronym has been
around for decades, but only recently entered the mainstream in China, where
rising costs and other economic woes have caused many young people to avoid
parenthood. The competition for schools and apartments is intensifying. Some
couples say they don’t want more than one child. Others want none at all.
The lifestyle is also in direct
conflict with the Chinese government’s effort to avert a coming demographic
crisis. On Monday, Beijing
once again revised its family planning policy, allowing families to have
three children instead of two. The announcement was meant to encourage couples
to make more babies, but men like Mr. Huang say they would rather remain
childless — even going under the knife to ensure it.
And their ranks appear to be growing.
Today in China, several insurance
companies market directly to “Double Income, No Kids” households. Matchmaking
agencies are advertising their services to single men and women who don’t want
children. Housing agents offer apartments that cater to childless couples.
Bedrooms once pitched as future nurseries are being converted into home gyms.
While Mr. Huang’s decision to have
a vasectomy may seem extreme, demographers have long warned that the rising
number of Chinese people choosing not to have children is a major reason for
the country’s shrinking population. According to the latest census, the average
household size is now 2.62, down from 3.1 in 2010.
Mr. Huang, who makes $630 a month
repairing mobile phones, said much of his decision had to do with his absent
parents as well as a lack of economic opportunity. His parents were factory
workers in southern Guangdong Province and rarely came to visit him in Hunan,
his hometown. They never developed a relationship with him, even though he was
their only child.
“If I got married and had a child,
I would still belong to the bottom class,” Mr. Huang said, referring to his
background as a child of struggling factory workers. “When the time comes, I
could also leave my child at home just like my parents. But I don’t want that.”
When he was 14, Mr. Huang left
Hunan to find work in Guangdong, too. He later fell in love with a woman who
wanted children, and he wrestled with the possibility of starting a family. He
eventually broke up with her and, in June 2019, went to a hospital in Guangzhou
for the vasectomy. He described it as a birthday gift to himself.
Besides Mr. Huang, The New York
Times spoke with two other Chinese men who had vasectomies. They both requested
not to use their full name for privacy reasons because some family and friends
remain unaware of their surgery.
Choosing voluntary sterilization,
especially as a young unmarried man, is still seen as culturally taboo in
China’s patriarchal society. In many cities, doctors require a proof of
marriage certificate and a partner’s consent. (Before the procedure, the doctor
asked Mr. Huang if he was married with children. He lied and said yes.)
Most Chinese people have heard of
sterilization in the context of the government’s earlier family
planning policy, when it limited each household to one child to slow
population growth during a period of rapid economic expansion. Though far more
women were forcibly sterilized under the “one-child” rule, in very few cases,
men were also taken away, for vasectomies.
The government’s three-child policy
announcement this week was the latest effort to reverse some of those
practices, but some men are now seeking the procedure on their own. Part of the
reason, they say, is wanting to share the burden of contraception with their
partner as they both pursue the DINK lifestyle.
Mr. Jiang, a 29-year-old personal
trainer in southern Fujian Province, said he tried to get a vasectomy in about
six hospitals and was rejected by all of them. The reason: He couldn’t provide
a “family planning certificate,” an official document that states a person’s
marital status and number of children
“They just refused to do it for me
and said, ‘Because you’re unmarried without any children, you are openly going
against the country’s birth policy,’” said Mr. Jiang, who is single.
In March, Mr. Jiang eventually
found a hospital in the southwestern city of Chengdu that was willing to
provide the surgery. He posted a detailed
account of the procedure in a forum for DINKs on Baidu, a popular
Chinese search engine. He said he wanted to change people’s minds about the
surgery because of a misconception that a vasectomy was the same as castration
and that it made men effeminate.
“I admire you,” wrote one user on
the forum. “Only a real warrior could take a knife to his own penis.”
“It’s for my own future happiness,”
Mr. Jiang responded.
For decades, Chinese people were
conditioned to have children out of tradition, filial obligation and,
ultimately, a fallback for retirement. But an expanding social security net and
a proliferation of insurance plans have given people more options.
China now has the world’s largest
number of single people. In 2018, the country reported 240 million of them,
accounting for about 17 percent of the total population. Although the
percentage is still smaller compared to the United States, the number has risen
by about a third since 2010.
“Young people today are not as
capable of enduring hardship as the older generation,” said He Yafu, an
independent demographer in the southern city of Zhanjiang. “Many think that not
only would children not care for them when they are old, but instead be
dependent on them. It’s better to save more money and enter a nursing home for
more security or buy insurance policies.”
In discussing the new three-child
policy, a government spokesman said on Monday that, on average, a Chinese
person born in the 1990s only wants 1.66 children, a 10 percent drop from
people born in the 1980s.
According to a 2018 study published
by the Journal of Chinese Women’s Studies, the direct economic cost of raising
a child from 0 to 17 years is about $30,000, seven times the annual salary of
the average Chinese citizen.
Those kinds of numbers are often
discussed in DINK forums, which have also become informal dating sites, with
some of the most popular threads being marriage advertisements.
“Yearning for a world of just two
people,” one read. “I really don’t like children, I can even say I hate them. I
know how difficult it is to raise them! The efforts are not proportional to the
gains!”
Another Mr. Huang (no relation to
Huang Yulong), a 24-year-old graduate student in computing in the city of Wuxi
who didn’t want his full name used, said he met his prospective partner, a
28-year-old woman, on a DINK forum. “I constantly tell her how high and scary
the costs of childbirth are to women,” he said.
After admitting online to his
fellow college friends that he feared having children, one person responded to
Mr. Huang by suggesting he get a vasectomy. Last November, Mr. Huang had the
surgery in the city of Suzhou. He called six hospitals before he could find a
doctor willing to provide the procedure, he said.
Mr. Huang’s retirement plan is to
emigrate to Iceland or New Zealand, countries that have relatively strong
social safety nets. He said he has calculated the number of years
that a child can perform his filial duties — “about 10 years” — and has
concluded that it is not worth it.
“Raising a child is a high-price,
low-return task,” he said. “I think having one is very troublesome.”
Sui-Lee Wee is a China
correspondent for The New York Times. She has covered China since 2010,
focusing on health care, gender and demographics.
Elsie Chen covers news about China
and is based in Seoul. @elsiechenyi
