"A great nation with thousands of years of history and a brilliant civilization is rapidly degenerating into a small group of the old and the weak thanks to these wrongheaded population-control policies."

Said Yi Fuxian, a researcher at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, quoted in "Beijing’s one-child policy is gone. But many Chinese are still reluctant to have more" (WaPo).

China’s population is forecast to peak at 1.45 billion as early as 2027, then slump for several decades. By 2050, about one-third of the population will be over the age of 65, and the number of working-age people is forecast to fall precipitously. Who will power the economy? Who will look after the elderly? Who will pay the taxes to fund their pensions?...

“To put it frankly, giving birth is not only a family matter but also a national issue,” read a commentary last year in the People’s Daily, the newspaper of the ruling Communist Party. “Not wanting to have kids is just a lifestyle of passively giving in to society’s pressures.”...

Some parents spend $15,000 a year bringing their toddlers to English, piano, dance, art and gymnastics classes, the manager said, noting that Wuhan isn’t Beijing or Shanghai.... Many Chinese parents would prefer to channel all of their resources into just one child....

Zeng Yulin, 32 who has a master’s degree in international economics, takes her 3-year-old daughter Yuewei to art classes and skating classes twice a week. Then there are the singing classes and the public-speaking lessons. In addition, Zeng will teach her English at home....

In a 2017 survey of working mothers by Zhaopin.com, one of China’s biggest job websites, only 22.5 percent said they wanted a second child. Nearly three times that number said they did not want more than one....

It's hard to get women to have the number of children that's best for the group. It's too much of a personal decision — emotional and economic. There are reasons for having a lot of children and reasons for having very few children. The group can do things to shift women from the first group to the second, but it's hard to move them into the middle position — especially after you've established one child as the ideal. It's funny (but not funny) for the government to apply pressure about "passively giving in to society’s pressures," especially when it created the very pressure that it now wants to pressure people not to give in to.