Population Is a Problem | The Lives of Two Big-City Families With a Second Child

It's too hard.

Every parent knows the feeling: the first step decides the next decade and more.

The first step is the move from kindergarten to primary school. "A good primary school — a good middle school — a good high school — a good university — a good job — a good life": that formula has held for several generations. Today it comes with far more conditions attached. A good kindergarten or primary school now requires an apartment in the right school district, early childhood education, parents with the right background, and ideally "wide connections."

In Shanghai, parents who want their children to want for nothing spend 6,000 to 7,000 yuan a month on everything a child needs. Ignoring inflation, raising one child to 18 comes to 1.3 to 1.5 million yuan. Add a second, and that figure could double.

Data from the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences in October 2016 showed that 61.5% of Shanghai households earn 100,000 to 200,000 yuan a year. By that measure, raising children is an enormous burden for most families in the city.

Chen Lina is right in the middle of it. Before she registered her marriage in February 2010, her life ran on a simple pattern: work on weekdays, shopping and fun on weekends. "I had my own social circle, my own job — it all felt just right."

Now every kind of trouble lands on her: tutoring her daughter, trading up to a bigger apartment and car, worrying that the grandparents looking after her daughter will wear themselves out. Every evening after work goes to her daughter; a weekend dinner at a friend's has to be timed around driving her daughter to a kindergarten-to-primary-school prep class. It has reached the point, she says, where going to work feels like a way to relax.

In a few days, Chen Lina will take her daughter Sun Chengyuan to interview at Qibao Foreign Language Primary School. She has no experience with any of it; everything she knows comes from forums like Liba.com and from what other mothers tell her. Her ideas about education are being tested. She used to believe in "happy education" — that children should first build habits and develop character. "Then one day you suddenly realize every mother around you is pushing her kid incredibly hard."

There may be as many as 600,000 parents like her in Shanghai. The city saw a birth boom in 2012, and with the children of parents who moved in from other provinces, its primary schools will have to enroll at least 300,000 children in 2018.

Starting in 2011, family-planning policy was loosened step by step, in the hope of encouraging people to have more children and offsetting the fading of China's demographic dividend. Even so, the two-child policy has not worked out as optimistically as policymakers predicted, and as the data has come in, population has become a worry for more and more people.

Behind every grand question of population policy lie countless small problems like the ones Chen Lina faces — and the reverse is true too. QDaily wants to use a series of reports on population to examine an aging society, a distorted population structure, and cities losing people. This is the first piece: the troubles of two families.

1. Expectations

What worries Chen Lina most right now is getting her daughter Sun Chengyuan into primary school.

In Shanghai, the interview is now the only hurdle between kindergarten and primary school. The Shanghai Municipal Education Commission requires private primary schools to submit their interview questions in advance and bans any question that tests academic subject knowledge; principals can be held accountable if they don't comply.

That sounds like good news. Chen Lina hasn't forced Sun Chengyuan to cram academic material. She did sign her up for a kindergarten-to-primary-school prep class, but when her daughter hits a question she can't answer, Chen Lina simply tells her it's first-grade material and she'll understand it later.

Her daughter's reserved nature worries her more. A few years ago she enrolled Sun Chengyuan in a Lego class; the other children bounced around while her daughter sat so nervous she barely dared move. Chen Lina is afraid a child who takes so long to warm up won't hold up in an interview.

Li Jing's older daughter, Wang Jingyi, is already in second grade, and Li Jing would certainly not agree with Chen Lina. Precisely because the interview is the only hurdle left, Li Jing believes there is room to "work it."

Two years ago, Wang Jingyi interviewed at the primary school attached to Shanghai International Studies University. Li Jing worked through the interview questions posted online and had her daughter repeat her answers back. "I checked, and everything she said was right, so I thought we had a decent shot." Wang Jingyi didn't get in.

"It feels like a black box — you have no idea why she wasn't admitted," Li Jing says, confused and resentful. "At this age, in terms of IQ, children really aren't that different from one another. You definitely feel it's unfair."

Scrapping the written exam for primary-school admission, and barring interview questions on academic subjects, were both Shanghai policies meant to lighten children's workload. Policymakers hoped this would stop parents from force-feeding their children course material.

It backfired. Parents still want their children in the best schools, so a wave of after-school training institutions sprang up to meet the demand — including the prep class Chen Lina enrolled Sun Chengyuan in, and the Xueersi English class Li Jing signed Wang Jingyi up for.

In late March, the Ministry of Education ordered that institutions reinforcing exam-oriented education "must be shut down if they should be shut down, and must have their licenses revoked if they should be revoked," while encouraging institutions that "cultivate students' interests, develop their talents, and advance well-rounded education."

Li Jing finds this hard to understand: "People our age all came up through exams, and honestly, exams may be the fairest method there is. The academic competitions were another path — if a child was good at that, they could take that route. Now the competitions have been cancelled and there's no path left. Well-rounded education takes even more effort, and it's harder to judge, less transparent."

Under the pressure of school admissions, holding on to your own educational philosophy becomes hard. After learning how hard the parents around her were pushing, Chen Lina began to doubt herself: "Slowly, slowly, I started to change. I began to feel my own ideas were too naive."

Li Jing went the other way. She once had very high hopes for Wang Jingyi, and bought more than 20,000 yuan of early-education classes without hesitating. "When she first started kindergarten I thought my daughter was pretty impressive — she picked things up fast, could recognize characters on her own, could read storybooks."

After Wang Jingyi entered a public primary school, Li Jing still imagined that the other parents in the class might not push their children that hard either. In the end Wang Jingyi could only manage a middling rank. "There are a few little academic stars in the class — they really are something."

Li Jing sighs: "Thinking it over, I've let it go — getting into Jiao Tong or Fudan isn't easy. Parents' expectations for their children just gradually come down." Now she thinks it wouldn't be bad if Wang Jingyi got into Shanghai University someday.

2. Well-Rounded Education?

Well-rounded education, all-around development, personal interests — these ideas have captured both Chen Lina and Li Jing.

Chen Lina doesn't think Sun Chengyuan has taken that many after-school classes, but between Lego as a toddler, fencing and drawing later, and piano, English and taekwondo at kindergarten, her daughter has already tried a fair number of pursuits before she has even started primary school.

Li Jing makes no attempt to hide it: "Wang Jingyi started early-education classes very young — art, dance, piano, painting, the whole spread." Once she started primary school, though, schoolwork took most of her time, and only two after-school classes survived: English and piano.

The piano lessons trouble Li Jing too. "I don't understand music. I used to sit next to her, and even when she played wrong notes I wouldn't notice. Eventually the piano teacher said that wouldn't do, so now I have to go to the lessons with Wang Jingyi and listen to what the teacher says. That's the only way I know at home whether she's playing well."

After-school classes have become these families' biggest expense.

A few years ago Chen Lina's husband, Sun Gang, used his connections to get their daughter into a kindergarten that "everyone in Shanghai is fighting to get into." Connections alone weren't enough: once she was in, they paid a 20,000-yuan sponsorship fee, which as far as they know was on the low end.

The kindergarten builds its daily curriculum around interest classes. Piano, taekwondo, pinyin, English — all cost extra. "3,800 yuan for English, 5,000 yuan for piano." Chen Lina remembers the figures exactly because the teachers collect the money in cash. You can choose not to pay, of course; then your child sits off to the side and watches the other children take the class.

Both Chen Lina and Li Jing understand that even well-rounded education isn't the whole of education.

Once, Wang Jingyi brought a bottle of nail polish to school and a few other girls in her class took it and secretly painted their nails. Li Jing heard about it from other parents. She didn't know whether to laugh or cry, and wanted to talk to her daughter but couldn't find a way in. After turning it over for a while, she lied and told her daughter the teacher had called her about it.

Was that the right way to handle it? Li Jing isn't sure herself. At least, she feels, talking with your child is better than saying nothing.

Chen Lina wants to help Sun Chengyuan get past her reserve too, but she doesn't really know how. Nobody is born knowing how to be a good parent.

3. What Does a Family of Four Mean?

Chen Lina also has a younger daughter, Sun Chengfei, who doesn't take as much worrying about for now. Chen Lina once brought two-and-a-half-year-old Sun Chengfei to a dinner with colleagues. A colleague pointed out that some of the food wasn't suitable for a child. Chen Lina wasn't bothered: "It's fine, let her eat it."

Li Jing feels the same — she was far more meticulous with Wang Jingyi. Perhaps having been through it once, she finds looking after her younger son, Wang Jingtian, easier.

But a more relaxed frame of mind doesn't mean the cost of raising children falls with it. Running a household of four is fundamentally different from running one of three.

Before 2010, the two-bedroom apartment was still the most popular unit on the market: one room for the couple, one for the child, just enough for the basic needs of a family of three.

Sun Gang and Chen Lina lived in a two-bedroom. To give the children more room to move, they gutted the living room — threw out the sofa and put a low table in the middle, where their two daughters can draw, write and play with toys.

It still feels cramped. The girls are small and a bunk bed already fills one bedroom. Once the older one starts primary school, this apartment clearly won't do. Chen Lina and Sun Gang both think four bedrooms is the ideal. "Three bedrooms is the bare minimum. If the grandparents come to stay sometimes, you really need a small four-bedroom."

Choosing a new place isn't easy. The older daughter has to get to primary school, the younger one to kindergarten, and both parents commute; the new apartment can't be far from any of them. On top of that, the old apartment has to be renovated, which means more upheaval.

What troubles them most is the price. Since the real estate reforms of 2003, local governments have grown dependent on revenue from land sales. Land prices kept climbing and housing prices surged with them. In 2017 the average transaction price for homes in Shanghai rose nearly 24% from 2016. Even Putuo District, the cheapest in the urban core, now runs above 80,000 yuan per square meter. Figuring a small four-bedroom at 120 square meters minimum, an apartment that meets Chen Lina and Sun Gang's needs would cost at least 10 million yuan. A mortgage of 3 to 4 million is unavoidable.

Li Jing's family moved not long ago. Shanghai's home-purchase rules made the process a rollercoaster. First they had to sell the old apartment to avoid a higher mortgage rate and a bigger down payment. Once the new place was renovated they had to leave it empty for a while to let the fumes clear. Through that stretch Li Jing's family could only rent. It took nearly a year before they were finally settled.

The car has to change too. Sun Gang used to drive a five-seat Ford, with Chen Lina and the two girls in the back. If they want to take the grandparents along on trips, a seven-seat SUV is closer to ideal. Sun Gang and Chen Lina bid for a Shanghai license plate ahead of time; over the past year the average winning bid for a plate has topped 90,000 yuan.

"Once you decide to have a second child, buying a bigger apartment and a bigger car are right there in front of you," Li Jing says.

4. Time Is as Tight as Money

Even if a family can cover a bigger apartment and a bigger car, one problem can't be dodged: for a two-income household today, looking after two children is genuinely hard.

Chen Lina was born in 1981; both her parents worked at large state-owned enterprises. In her memory, she spent her childhood in the nurseries and kindergartens those enterprises ran. In the 1980s, Shanghai's better-resourced state enterprises and public institutions set up nurseries and kindergartens to solve their employees' childcare problem.

But as state enterprises became less profitable, the idea of enterprises "running society" came to be seen as a major drag on their development. Shanghai's enterprises and public institutions then closed their nurseries and kindergartens one after another. In 2016, Shanghai had around 250,000 newborns a year and only 40 nurseries in the whole city, able to take just over 6,000 children between 18 and 36 months old.

For families like Chen Lina's, the job of raising the children falls naturally to the grandparents — and they still need to hire a nanny.

Chen Lina's nanny starts at 7:30 a.m., five days a week. On her way to the couple's apartment she picks up some vegetables. By the time she arrives, Chen Lina's parents are already there, watching the younger daughter, Sun Chengfei. Besides caring for the children alongside the grandparents, the nanny cooks and cleans.

Li Jing's parents live in the same residential compound as she does. During the day they look after her younger son, Wang Jingtian. But she worries about their health and doesn't dare let them tire themselves out; if a grandparent got sick, the whole family's rhythm would collapse.

A friend's experience recently hit close to home. "Her family was actually well off — her husband was the kind of person government leaders receive. Then, when she was about to have her second child, her mother fell ill. She died two months before the birth. After that her husband's parents rushed in from out of town, just to help watch the child. Then, before the baby was six months old, her mother-in-law suddenly got sick too, and by the time she reached the hospital they couldn't save her. Now the family relies entirely on a nanny."

Li Jing thinks that can't work. "For a lot of day-to-day life it's better to have the grandparents around. Even if you hire a nanny to do things, without a grandparent helping keep an eye on things you just aren't at ease. Really not."

Four grandparents, two middle-aged adults, two children: this family structure is extremely fragile. For the middle-aged couple sandwiched in between, both the old and the young need looking after. That is a direct result of the family-planning policy strictly enforced from 1978. Because families could have only one child, family size was artificially compressed, and as the life cycle turns, a couple in their prime working years ends up responsible for supporting and raising six people.

This past Lunar New Year, Li Jing took the grandparents and the children to Japan. Maybe they had overdone it, because Wang Jingyi came down with a fever that night. It was during a major flu outbreak, and an essay titled 《流感中的北京中年》 ("A Middle-Aged Beijinger in the Flu") was circulating online. Its author, a middle-aged man, described how one moment's carelessness in looking after an elderly relative led to the old man's sudden death from flu within a month.

Late that night, Li Jing decided to call an ambulance and take her daughter to the hospital. Since everyone lived together, she also worried that the grandparents and the other child would catch it. She spent the whole night frantic. "Nothing can go wrong with the grandparents' health. If something happened to them, everything would fall apart."

Li Jing envies families with several siblings — whatever happens, they can at least help one another. "And with looking after the elderly, the responsibility gets spread out. Having brothers and sisters really does make things a lot easier," she says.

5. Is There Any Personal Life Left?

Having children has completely overturned the way these families live. The children's schedules now decide how the household runs each day. Both Chen Lina and Li Jing find that the only breathing room they get is the hour or hour and a half after they drop the children at their after-school classes.

Chen Lina remembers that back when it was just the two of them, cooking dinner was a pleasure. Sun Gang is a decent cook, and after work the two of them would share four dishes and a soup. Now, the moment they get home, everything revolves around the children. "Now I just like to make a soup and throw in extra vegetables. Otherwise it's a waste of time — better to spend the extra time resting or with the kids, anything but that."

The housework is heavier too. Chen Lina complains: "The washing machine never stops — the grandparents' clothes, the children's, ours. We run it three times a day." A dishwasher has partly rescued the household; the dozen or so pots, bowls and plates from one meal now go straight in.

When Li Jing gets home in the evening, she has to sit on Wang Jingyi's homework. "If I sit next to her, she finishes everything. If I'm not there — say I mark the problems and tell her to finish them that afternoon — she just won't do them. And her grandparents like watching movies, so she'll drift over and hang around them instead."

So she stays in Wang Jingyi's room, either looking at her phone or doing chores. The moment she steps out and comes back, she is guaranteed to find Wang Jingyi not doing her homework.

Li Jing sometimes finds this life infuriating. "Working all day and then looking after the kids on top of it, you're exhausted, and you basically have no time of your own. This year I wanted to start going to the gym or something, and I thought, no, I can't let the family drag me down."

The family makes Chen Lina so anxious that work itself has turned into her release: "These days I actually value the chance to go to work more."

6. The Security, Anxiety and Compromises of a Career

Chen Lina works for a foreign-invested chemical company. In recent years the company has stressed improving human-resources efficiency — that is, cutting staff. Some people in her department have already left because of it. Sun Gang, also in the chemical industry, is at a company that is still doing reasonably well, but it too has layoff plans.

The chemical industry has relatively high barriers to entry and doesn't change much. Li Jing, who works in auto sales, feels the internet's impact plainly.

"It used to be that we'd build the cars and then take them to the traditional channel — dealer showrooms, 4S stores — to sell. Now that's starting to change too. It's like years ago, when buying a television was a big purchase and you had to go to a store to look at it. Now we buy TVs and computers straight online. Maybe one day buying a car will work like that, and you won't need to go to any store. You go online, pick your configuration, customize it yourself, and the order goes straight into the factory, which automatically matches you to what you need."

After many years working, Li Jing knows how fast this society moves. "So many companies — when we graduated from college, Bell, Alcatel, GE were considered great places, and now they're gone. In a little over ten years they collapsed in an instant. I'm in autos, and my company's development still looks decent, still fairly stable, but the whole auto industry is actually pretty precarious. Look at the EV startups — they're hitting the traditional auto industry hard."

Li Jing is afraid of falling behind society, but "we probably don't have the ability to change anything ourselves."

Women face the added problem of gender discrimination at work. Companies still have to pay the social benefits of a woman on maternity leave, and it disrupts internal staffing, so many companies are reluctant to hire or promote female employees.

Chen Lina joined her current company not long after graduating and has been there more than ten years. Foreign companies also tend to protect female employees' rights more thoroughly, so she hasn't run into this. Li Jing counts herself lucky too, and puts it down to her company having a stronger sense of social responsibility — though she admits her boss happened to be transferred during her maternity leave, which is why nobody interfered with it.

Hidden discrimination is always there.

After one of Li Jing's promotions, the head of her department said they shouldn't promote any more women, that it was better to put men into management. "Because we're in auto sales. If you have to travel, he'll think it's inconvenient for a woman. Sometimes, to avoid any appearance of impropriety, the boss will only take a male assistant along."

"Female employees, especially in a traditional industry like ours, are definitely at a disadvantage — men's career paths are better than women's," Li Jing says. "I've made my peace with it. My workload isn't that heavy right now, so I can basically balance family and work. Take my boss: from the time his daughter was born until she turned six, he may have spent fewer than 30 days a year at home."

Li Jing has grown used to this division of labor. In her own family too, her husband earns the money outside the home while she puts more of her energy into the household.

She understands that all of it amounts to discrimination against women, but "that's just how it is."

7. Some Things Are Simply Beyond Your Control

Shanghai's air was especially bad this past winter. A long-running model of pollute first, clean up later has left environmental problems deeply entrenched. In three months, officials reported 12 days of light pollution, 3 of moderate pollution and 3 of heavy pollution. Whenever the air turns like that, Chen Lina doesn't dare take her children outside, afraid they'll be left coughing.

Then there's food safety. The 2008 Sanlu tainted milk powder scandal still frightens parents today. Chen Lina complains: "If you run out of cooking oil, you go downstairs to the supermarket and grab a jug. But in a country this big, we still have to stockpile our own formula and diapers."

Soaring prices worry Li Jing. Every time she goes out and buys enough fruit for the family, she says, one or two hundred yuan is gone. Not long ago The Economist published its latest ranking of the world's most expensive cities to live in; Shanghai came 21st among more than 130 cities worldwide.

There's also the pressure of other parents. In second grade, Li Jing threw Wang Jingyi her first birthday party — a small banquet room rented at a hotel, seven or eight classmates and their parents invited, a small buffet.

Li Jing hadn't wanted to. "A child this small, and already worrying about 'social' matters" struck her as slightly off. But once Wang Jingyi started primary school, all the other parents were throwing birthday parties. Between the pull of reciprocity and Wang Jingyi's envious looks, Li Jing gave in. A party like that costs a bit over 2,000 yuan.

8. Getting Old… Getting Old!

Chen Lina feels she has gotten old. She had her children too late.

"My daughter hasn't even started first grade and I'm already 37 — suddenly I feel old. You want to spend more time with her, and you want to have more energy for it. I never thought I married late, and I didn't feel late when I got pregnant either. But once she was born and I held her, and she slowly grew up, I began to feel I was too old."

Marrying and having children later is common now, and in an economy as developed as Shanghai's, the willingness to have children is falling faster still. Nearly 95% of women in Shanghai now marry after 23, and by 2015 the average age at first birth had passed 29. Because conceiving after 34 counts medically as advanced maternal age, with sharply higher risks, the ordinary childbearing window for women in Shanghai has effectively shrunk to six years.

"Even if the policy allowed it, I wouldn't have a third," Chen Lina says. "I don't have the energy anymore."

Almost all their time and energy goes to the children, so much so that they rarely think about their own future. Asked about old age, both Chen Lina and Li Jing seem at a loss. For now it isn't a question they have to consider.

"Retirement is still far off, and anyway, aren't they raising the retirement age? Some say we won't be able to retire until our sixties," Li Jing explains. Pressed to think about old age, the only thing she can manage is that she'll stay in Shanghai.

She probably doesn't realize that Shanghai has already become the most aged city in the country. In 2017 the city had 4.836 million residents aged 60 and over, 33.2% of the registered population. That year the dependency ratio — the load the working-age population, 15 to 59, carries for those 60 and over — reached 58.8%, meaning every 1.6 working-age people must support one elderly person.

By 2050, Shanghai's aging rate is projected to reach 45%. By then, pension payments, elder care and the city's own economic development could all be affected.

Slowing that pace, and buying time to find answers to it, requires families like Chen Lina's and Li Jing's to have more children. But every pressure described above — school admissions, education, housing prices, childcare, careers, society at large — works against their willingness to do so.

All of it connects back to today's population problem. In 2017, the second year after the two-child policy was fully opened up, the number of births fell from 2016. That has deepened the worry about population further. The China National Committee on Aging forecasts that by 2050, a third of the country's population will be 60 or older.

The next installment will look at aging communities.

(At the interviewees' request, Chen Lina, Sun Gang, Sun Chengyuan, Sun Chengfei, Li Jing, Wang Jingyi and Wang Jingtian are pseudonyms.)

Cover image: stills from the films Boyhood and Ferris Bueller's Day Off (《春天不是读书天》).