‘The last generation’: the young Chinese people vowing not to have children

Talk to any young woman in urban China about the prospects of having children and the chances are, they are not keen. “It costs too much to give kids a decent life. The stuff they teach at school is propaganda, so I’d want to send them to an international school or abroad. But I can’t afford that,” said Kongkong, a 26-year-old researcher who swears she will not have children.

This week, the Chinese government announced the country has entered an “era of negative population growth”, after figures showed a historic drop in the number of people for the first time since the great famine between 1958 and 1961. The population fell by 850,000 to 1.41 billion people in 2022, according to the National Bureau of Statistics.

Read more