China Is Still Haunted by Its One-Child Policy

Residents of mainland China are concerned about discrimination based on family size more than any other population and are likely to have friends discourage them from having additional children, according to a comprehensive new study shared with National Review.

The study was conducted by the Institute of Family Studies and Brigham Young University’s Wheatley Institute and relied on surveys of nearly 10,000 people across about a dozen countries. The surveys revealed a divergence in attitudes toward family formation between mainland China and their eastern neighbors of Japan and South Korea. The separation is likely a result of the Chinese Communist Party’s one-child policy, which ran from 1979 to 2015, researchers said.

In early 2016, China began allowing parents to have two children, and in 2021, the country increased the limit to three.

“I think the one-child policy has definitely done a lot to China and is still affecting the culture,” study co-author and IFS research associate Peter Foreshaw Brookes told National Review. “If you look at people who were born just after the one-child policy was introduced, versus just before, the ones who were born just after had lower fertility desires than the ones born just before, as in literally by one year.”

He continued, “So growing up around it, being an only child, and being surrounded by only children in your school year seems to predict low fertility desires.”

Mainland China’s fertility rate is about 0.9 children per woman, while its eastern neighbors of South Korea and Japan were 0.8 and 1.1, respectively, in 2025. Though their fertility rates are similar, the study shows China, South Korea, and Japan diverging in their attitudes about pregnancy and birth.

While China is still dealing with the after effects of the one-child policy, the country benefits from a longstanding Confucian tradition that prioritizes family and childbearing.

China was the only country among the dozen surveyed where more than 50 percent of respondents said their parents encouraged them to have children. China was also the third most likely country to express the importance of children carrying on their family name, and Chinese respondents reported much higher expectations that their friends and family would help out if they had either their first or another child. Meanwhile, only 5 percent of Japanese and only 9 percent of South Korean respondents said they expected help from their friends if they had their first baby.

However, mainland Chinese respondents reported 250 percent more discrimination based on how many children their family had than South Korea or Japan. Chinese respondents also ranked second among all countries included in the survey in terms of how likely they were to have been discouraged from having more children by family or friends.

“This is a real legacy of the one-child policy, which for decades punished people for having more than one child,” Benedict Rogers, the senior director of Fortify Rights, told National Review. “The state carried out forced abortions, people grew up with this indoctrination that they should only have one child, and I suspect that the legacy of that is still lingering.”

China’s tactics to enforce its one-child policy included a wide range of brutality. “There was a widespread policy of the state forcibly aborting children from families with more than one child,” Rogers said. Outside government-led punishment, the one-child rule aided infanticide of female babies, “because there was a culture of parents wanting their one child to be a boy,” he added.

Breaking the one-child policy also resulted in forced sterilization, workplace discrimination, fines, arrests, and other penalties. “It was enforced very, very cruelly,” Rogers said.

While the CCP has eased the rule to allow three children, China’s fertility rate still sits a little below one. “Perhaps the population hasn’t totally adjusted to that,” Rogers said.

In the same way that fear of discrimination deters some Chinese parents from having additional children, the study found that childless people’s decisions about having their first child were influenced by their peers. Respondents with unsupportive friends were less likely to say they intended to have a child, while those with supportive, pro-baby friends were meaningfully more likely. Positive reinforcement meaningfully increased parents’ intention to have children.

Like many western countries, China’s falling fertility rate is expected to have significant economic impacts as its working-age population shrinks and its dependent, retirement-age population grows. In response, the CCP has shifted from discouraging family formation to promoting it. The party released a comprehensive pro-natalism policy framework in 2021 which included some policies that have also been adopted in the west, including encouraging companies to offer more generous parental-leave benefits. Some local party officials have taken a more coercive approach, calling up newlyweds in their area to ask when they would begin having children.