The CCP (and often communist revolutions in general) underestimate the massive intergenerational effects of societal rehaul that can only be restored with policies more draconian than the ones that destroyed those norms in the first place.
China now has 2 generations that've never known uncles, aunts, siblings or the conception of family beyond the nuclear unit. New norms have developed around the amount of investment that parents are expected to put in a child, with work being the only other thing that is supposed to matter.
The soft incentives have realigned to strongly discourage children. Multiple children makes it difficult for parents to be invested in a single child or work in a way that society expects them to. The thousand year long values of sibling relationships have to be built back up from zero, and is not trivial in the least.
For a country where maternity leave is punishing to a woman's career, a career that women are also taught to care deeply for, convincing women to have multiple children will be a tall ask. We are already seeing a plummeting marriage rate and an average marriage age that's steadily rising.
With all of these things in mind, the only way CCP reverses the current trend, is if they pull a Mao and practically force people to marry more and earlier/have multiple children by introducing incentives as draconian as Mao's China.
China now has 2 generations that've never known uncles, aunts, siblings or the conception of family beyond the nuclear unit. New norms have developed around the amount of investment that parents are expected to put in a child, with work being the only other thing that is supposed to matter.
The soft incentives have realigned to strongly discourage children. Multiple children makes it difficult for parents to be invested in a single child or work in a way that society expects them to. The thousand year long values of sibling relationships have to be built back up from zero, and is not trivial in the least.
For a country where maternity leave is punishing to a woman's career, a career that women are also taught to care deeply for, convincing women to have multiple children will be a tall ask. We are already seeing a plummeting marriage rate and an average marriage age that's steadily rising.
With all of these things in mind, the only way CCP reverses the current trend, is if they pull a Mao and practically force people to marry more and earlier/have multiple children by introducing incentives as draconian as Mao's China.