FOREWORD
Thisis a book about the very low fertility rates we see in contemporary Pacific Asia—about how they might have come about, what policies have been implemented to try to increase them (and why those policies have largely had little effect), and what the consequences of all of this might be.
The problem with writing a book about any contemporary issue is that “contemporary” at the time of writing, publishing, and reading can mean three different things. While I cannot predict the future, I can at least acknowledge what has changed in the past year or so since the final draft went off to the publisher. Fortunately, the new trends only make the central message of the book timelier. In December 2018, it was announced that South Korea’s total fertility rate (TFR) fell to 0.96, its lowest level ever and one of the very lowest national TFRs ever recorded. China has ceased publishing the data required to adequately calculate the TFR at the national level, perhaps reflecting a concern about extremely low levels. However, we do know that in 2018 just 15 million children were born in China. This figure—significantly lower than the 20 million forecasted by the Chinese government—is further evidence that the two-child policy is not a “silver bullet” to fix the population problem. The 2018 TFR in Singapore fell to 1.16, a 10-year low. In Japan, while the TFR appears to have stabilized at around 1.4, changes to the population structure mean that only around 925,000 births were recorded in 2018, again the lowest number on record.
Taken together, the very latest data from Pacific Asia show us that fertility remains stubbornly low, even at a time when the rhetoric surrounding both aging and low fertility is increasing, and in the midst of ever more comprehensive
policies designed to encourage (or at least support) childbearing. There is little evidence across the region that any upswing in either period or cohort fertility rates is in the cards in the near future (see Chapter 2 for definitions of these measures). Indeed, the economic and demographic conditions in China—with the likely significant increase in age at first birth—means that period TFR may well decline before any rebound is seen.
Turning away from Pacific Asia, we see other developments in the immediate past that have affected the message of this book. The rise of populism in Europe and the link to conservative views of the family and to an antimigrant sentiment have led some governments to develop pronatalist policies, often with very restrictive views of gender roles and resistance to newer forms of family formation (to put it politely). Hungary, for example, has allocated 0.3% of its GDP by 2020 to pay for new family policies. However, these policies are not grounded in rights or fulfilling individual aspirations—nor are they even a holistic response to greater challenges such as population aging. Rather, they are based on politics and precisely the narrow unidimensional or two-dimensional thinking about population policy that this book argues against.
Finally, we have seen changes in something that many demographers have tended to take for granted, namely, the higher fertility rates seen in Northern Europe. I, for one, will admit a kind of complacency when looking for policy “formulas” for higher fertility. We have been able to consistently associate the higher fertility rates in Scandinavia with a particular style of welfare state and approach to work, the family, and gender. Similarly, albeit for a different and rather quixotic set of reasons, the fertility rates in the United Kingdom, North America, and Australia were set out as an alternative framework of “higher” fertility. These higher tracks were set apart from lower fertility rates in Southern, Eastern, and Central Europe, with associated claims about the various contexts and regimes in which we might see these different TFRs as an outcome.
In very recent history, this story has become far less clear-cut. In the AngloSaxon world, period TFRs have consistently been declining from around the 2.0 mark down to around 1.8—still high, but not so far away from the historically much lower TFRs in the German-speaking countries, which are now around 1.5. Perhaps more striking, though, is the collapse of period TFR in parts of Scandinavia. In Finland, seven consecutive years of decline mean that, at 1.49 in 2018, the country reported its lowest TFR since the famine years of 1866 to 1868. In Norway, the TFR fell to 1.62, another record low. All of this occurred despite a suite of internationally recognized policies providing generous maternity and paternity leave, subsidized daycare programs, financial support to all families regardless of income level, and a range of other measures aimed promoting both work-life balance and gender equity at home and the workplace.
Of course, we do not know whether these lower period TFRs will translate into significant cohort declines (again see Chapter 2 for a discussion of what this means). Similarly, because of the short-term nature of these changes, there is
little consensus around the key underlying drivers. But it does point us to two things of relevance to this book. First, in terms of persistently higher fertility in postindustrial and advanced economies, there is clearly no one magic formula for countries to follow. This means we have to update our thinking. Even 10 years ago, for example, the idea that Germany would have the same period TFR as Finland would have been risible.
The second major lesson is that low fertility has not “gone away” in Europe. As I argue in this book, if we see low fertility—or at least the gap between aspirations and outcomes—not as a problem in itself but rather as a symptom of other upstream institutional malfunctions, then we need to redouble our efforts to look both at this new era of very low fertility in the European context and at linkages and commonalities to the Asian context. In the post–Economic Crisis world, what roles can be ascribed to dualization of the labor market? Or welfare state retrenchment? Or the development of more conservative views linked to populism? Only through a holistic understanding of the nature and context of family formation (and aging) in a comparative framework can we begin to develop public policies to adequately engage with—and, arguably, properly specify—the “population problem” in Pacific Asia, Europe, and beyond.
Finally, for the most up-to-date data, readers are directed to the following Web resources:
World Population Prospects, United Nations: population.un.org/wpp/ World Development Indicators, World Bank: wdi.worldbank.org/
The Human Fertility Database, MPIDR & VID: humanfertility.org
1
ECONOMIC BOOM, DEMOGRAPHIC BOMB?
THE “POPULATION PROBLEM” IN PACIFIC ASIA
Anyone who studies the demography of Pacific Asia might be forgiven for thinking that there is no good news at all. China, Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, and South Korea,1 once the places of so much economic hope, are now more often than not presented as demographically decrepit. Sometimes it is hard to tell which is the most favored subject for writers in newspapers or business magazines: the apocalyptic forecasts of aging and decline, or the ever more imaginative, maybe desperate, ways in which governments are trying to tackle it. Think switching the lights off in government offices on a Wednesday night to encourage baby-making.
The way the “problem” is presented is very simple: Population aging and decline are bad—bad for the economy, bad for the maintenance of health and welfare systems, bad for the existential future of the country, even bad for the race or the culture. Low fertility is the culprit. As such: fix low fertility, fix the problem.
These attempts at “fixing” low fertility have taken the form of a suite of policies across the region focused both on incentivizing childbearing in a monetary sense and on trying to ameliorate the perceived boundaries to either marriage or having children. These fixes either address concerns that people give to survey-takers about childbearing or otherwise try to cajole people into doing something that, if you believe the prevailing narrative, they simply do not want to do. Often wedded to nationalist discourses and a culture of blame, there is generally a rather thin line between the “carrot and stick.” In China, meanwhile, there is a simpler view: allowing people to have more children will make the population problem go away.
The only problem is that these policies don’t seem to be working especially well. These territories still have some of the very lowest fertility rates in the world.
Just thinking in terms of a quasi-natural experiment, for example, Singapore and Hong Kong arguably have rather similar background causes of low fertility. Singapore has probably the most comprehensive suite of family policies to support marriage and childbearing in the world. Hong Kong, meanwhile, has a modest tax break for parents of newborns. Indeed, the Hong Kong population policy explicitly states that “we believe it is not appropriate for the [government] to adopt policies to promote childbirth, a matter very much of individual choices” (HKSAR Government 2003, 60). Yet, despite these major differences in policies (which have been in place for many years now), Hong Kong and Singapore have almost identical total fertility rates. In China, meanwhile, the most recent set of relaxation of the family planning restrictions began in 2013, when couples of whom at least one partner was an only child were allowed to have two children, followed up in 2015 when the National Two-Child Policy was instituted in China. However, the “baby tsunami” that was expected to occur in China after these policy changes does not appear to have transpired (Wee 2016). Furthermore, it is not just that the population problem hasn’t been fixed. The discourse, rather, has turned toxic, almost as if exasperation has set in. Old people blame young people for being individualistic, narcissistic, and causing a “social recession” by eschewing their generational responsibilities. In this prevailing narrative, which is employed by journalists, politicians, and even scholars, a generation has given up on marriage and childbearing, choosing instead to focus on their own self-actualization. Young people, meanwhile, resent the older generation for making their lives intolerable through their management of politics and the economy and for the irksome prospect of not having a pension or a lifetime job security. Both generations seem to think that the other “never had it so good.” Scholars in China are, supposedly with a straight face, genuinely advocating a tax on the childless to transfer money into a fund designed to support couples who want a second child (Gao 2018). Politicians in some territories, meanwhile, appear to be genuinely worried about their citizens going the same way as the Japanese sea lion and the Formosan clouded leopard—namely, becoming extinct. Meanwhile, the blame game is not just intergenerational. The tension between the sexes is palpable. The rejection of childbearing is, so it is argued, just as much a rejection of the “marriage package.” For women, so the narrative goes, men either are only interested in subjugation and imposing gendered domestic norms or will only become a drain on the women through their inability to get a job. Men tend to be referred to as the villains of the piece, imposing their hierarchical, old-fashioned views on women, but also simultaneously are castigated for being ‘unmanly’ or, so the Japanese meme goes, soushoku danshi, or “grass-eating boys” or “herbivores” because of a perceived lack of interest in dating, sex, and certainly commitment (Harney 2009).
Then you get the tragedies: In February 2017, an unnamed civil servant in South Korea’s Ministry of Health and Welfare returned to work after giving birth to her third child (Taipei Times 2017). You might think this is a success story
given the hard and soft policies outlined previously. Three children! Back to work! And all in the Ministry responsible for encouraging childbearing! Only, in this case, this 34-year-old mother of three had a heart attack and died just a week later. She was working seven-day weeks to catch up on her workload and taking primary responsibility for looking after her children (Straits Times 2016b).
Now, the world doesn’t need another book complaining about this state of affairs; presenting miserable forecasts of a miserable future. We need to think differently about this. Do it differently. Conceptually, even, some big questions have not really been properly asked. Everyone says the fertility rate is too low, but then that assumes that there is a “right” fertility rate. If that’s the case, what is it, and why? A shrinking population is perceived as a mortal problem, as is aging. But is this demographically deterministic view about the size of populations really so valid?
A DIFFERENT APPROACH TO THE PROBLEM
Thinking multidimensionally
What I want to argue in this book, then, is that we need to change our thinking of the population problem in two ways. The current way to think about it is in a linear, two-dimensional direction. Aging and decline = bad; low fertility = cause; therefore, fix low fertility. Rather, I think we need to think multidimensionally about this. We need to be much clearer about what we mean by low fertility and how this measure is composed. We then need to learn more about what the preferences are for people and whether we are really in a no-hope era of individualism in which children are an expensive consumer good whose direct and indirect opportunity costs are just too high. We need to find out more about the context of these clearly changing choices regarding how marriage and childbearing fit into the life cycle of men and women in low-fertility Pacific Asia (LFPA).2 In other words, if we can better identify the root of the issue, then we can design better policies to support people.
So far, so normal: how to design more cunning ways to get people to have more babies. But, my approach is different.
There is strong evidence that, despite what the narrative might suggest, people do want to have children, and they do want to get married—or at least get into long-term, stable unions. These low-marriage and low-fertility rates, I suggest, are the outcome of a malfunction in society—a consequence of institutions that are not working to allow people to actualize their own aspirations. Few people in the region report at a young age an aspiration to be single and childless for their whole lives, but high percentages of people are. Of course, many women and men are unable to become parents for biological reasons, with extended postponement of childbearing only serving to increase the chances of not being able
to conceive. But, this does not account for the very high proportions we see in places such as Hong Kong. So, what is going on? Are respondents lying systematically in surveys? Or, more likely, is it the case that things happening in their lives simply don’t allow that desired situation to come about? I am not the first person to make this argument. Australian demographer Peter McDonald puts it very succinctly: “ideals go unrealized because of countervailing forces ensuing from the nature of modern societies” (McDonald 2006, 26). In other words, “Low fertility is an unintended rather than a deliberate outcome of changing social and economic institutions” (McDonald 2006, 26).
This gets us to think differently about low fertility. Rather than being the problem, it is the symptom of various institutional malfunctions. There have (rightly) been strong criticisms of prevailing fertility policies for using women’s bodies to meet some kind of target of fertility. I would argue that policies that put aspirations of individuals first and that explore (and ultimately remove) the barriers to achieving these aspirations are likely to be the policies that succeed. But, these policies should also be multidimensional in terms of looking at these barriers to achieving aspirations and how they might be removed.
Indeed, there is arguably a precedent when we look at the “other side of the coin” with regard to population policies, namely, policies to bring fertility rates down. There is an argument that family planning policies over the past half century were so effective because they were aligned with the aspirations of women. Women wanted fewer children, more education, more rights, and more opportunities for themselves and their offspring. Beneath these aspirations, however, were multiple barriers relating to institutions, family, gender, and so on. Fertility was decreased, then, not just by one policy of flooding the population with contraceptives. Rather, it was a comprehensive suite of policies that addressed the gamut of barriers to lowering fertility: from health to education; from access to family planning to acceptance of family planning; and by talking to women and men. It wasn’t easy, but it was successful. It was successful because it was built on the premise that high fertility might have been considered a problem but was fundamentally an outcome of other problems.
Now, turning to low-fertility countries, there is an argument—set out previously—that these policies to encourage childbearing are not working because they are not aligned with women’s aspirations. This is the narrative of individualism, of egoism, of giving up. This view has been justified by a latent intergenerational tension and, arguably, a misreading of demographic and social theory. But, this idea that children have gone out of fashion doesn’t hold water. Surveys say that there is still a relatively strong demand not only to have children but also to have more than one (although there are some important regional differences). Having said that, it is clear that there are a number of obstacles to achieving this aspiration. At the time of writing, I am living in Hong Kong. Housing is very expensive. The expectations for your children are sky-high, and so are the costs of giving them what is felt to be the best education. Working
hours are incredibly long and not conducive to either dating or looking after small families. Getting a stable, well-paid job is increasingly an aspiration in itself, rather than an expectation. We see the same issues across the region. In this vein, giving someone a few thousand dollars might help a bit, but it is hardly going to be transformative. But, then, policies that directly address some of these features (e.g., accessing child care) don’t seem to have much success either.
Of course, if you actually talk to people, you will quickly find that the barriers to marriage and childbearing are quite multidimensional in nature, drawing on almost all aspects of life. While surveys might give the top three reasons for staying single, these life choices are the result of myriad social processes operating at the family, community, local, regional, and global levels. Only by really understanding these processes and how they operate as barriers to meeting aspirations do we have any chance of overcoming them. In other words, we have to think multidimensionally about fertility. The point I want to make in this book is that apparently problematic demographic measures, then, are an outcome or a symptom of other problems rather than a ‘problem to be fixed’ in and of themselves.
Toward a Rights-Based Approach
Although this might prove to be a more successful way of increasing fertility, we are arguably still stuck in the same paradigm of a problem of low fertility that needs to be fixed. Imagine for a moment that we don’t actually take the fertility rate as being a problem at all. In fact, just completely take it out of the equation. Rather, focus on the (stylized) fact that there is most often a gap between the number of children that people say they want and the number of children they end up having. You could consider this over space, or over time. Now, simply imagine that the ideal family sizes were translated into the actual fertility rates. In many sub-Saharan countries, fertility rates are high. However, if one turns to the fertility ideals of adolescent girls—the next generation of mothers—these are frequently much lower (Dorling and Gietel-Basten 2017). If these ideals were to be realized in sub-Saharan Africa, for example, fertility rates would often be lower, in some cases much lower. Also, we might imagine that if these girls in sub-Saharan Africa find themselves able to meet these preferences, this may well be because they have better lives Better education, better health, better opportunities, better rights, better choices. Absolutely rightly, these aspirations are the spur to improve the opportunities for these women through a wide suite of policies, broadly considered as “development.” In Figure 1.1, I show how the ideal family size and actual fertility rates have altered over time. In the case of Taiwan, the lower ideal family size was an important element in shaping the island’s highly successful family planning framework (Freedman, Chang, and Sun 1994). I think you can argue, then, that in the same way that the aspiration to have fewer children was a spur to action in the earlier period, so, too, is the gap between ideals and reality today.
TFR/ideal family size
Mean ideal family size TFR
Figure 1.1. The gap between ideal and realized fertility, women aged 15 to 45 years, Taiwan. TFR = total fertility rate.
Sources: Republic of China National Development Council 2016; various surveys.
In other words, we can change the narrative. Rather than talking about “targets” set by the state, we can instead talk about “aspirations” set by people. In doing this, we are much more aligned with the reproductive rights agenda that was agreed on by (almost) all countries of the world back at the International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo in 1994. In the declaration that emanated from that conference, it was said that “Reproductive health . . . implies that people are able to have a satisfying and safe sex life and that they have the capability to reproduce and the freedom to decide if, when and how often to do so” (UNFPA 2004). This statement was largely designed to be appropriate for countries where women felt cajoled into limiting their childbearing for the sake of a target; I would argue that the same principle holds for people in low-fertility countries.
Objective 7.14 is, therefore, for signatories:
To help couples and individuals meet their reproductive goals in a framework that promotes optimum health, responsibility and family well-being, and respects the dignity of all persons and their right to choose the number, spacing and timing of the birth of their children. (UNFPA 2004, 65)
By adopting this rights-based approach, with preferences at the center, we can completely rethink our entire approach to fertility. We can move away from one that blames and stigmatizes—that uses the female body as a vessel to achieve national targets. In short, we can move toward a system that allows personal,
not national, reproductive goals to be met. Rather conveniently, the reproductive goals of most people in LFPA actually align quite neatly with those of the state. As such, it can be win-win outcome.
If we can combine this rights-based approach with a multidimensional view of fertility, we can actually see the ways in which institutions—including, but certainly not limited to, the state—can be reformed to enable people to achieve their aspirations. I think that, if this were to be the case, the idea of low fertility as a problem would pretty much go away. Furthermore, I think there is a good chance that societies will be better.
Nico van Nimwegen, a Dutch demographer, once said, “States get the fertility rates that they deserve.” I think there is certainly something in this. The evidence seems to suggest that people know better than states about what’s best for them. I don’t think that should come as a huge surprise. But, I think we need to be more radical still.
Changing the Parameters
Low fertility is a problem because aging and population decline are a problem. Yet, actually I don’t think this is true. Low fertility is just a “thing.” It is, in and of itself, completely neutral. So is population aging, and so is population decline. For that matter, so is population growth. It is only systems and institutions that apply a value to these demographic measurements. Classical economic theory tells us that growth is good (much as Gordon Gecko told us that “greed is good”). But, increasingly, we are starting to question that paradigm, recognizing that the population component of gross domestic product (GDP) growth can be driven by changes in quality as well as by the quantity of the population. Similarly, in terms of the environment, although some exceptions exist (e.g., Emmott 2013), there is a general trend toward thinking that it is really about behavior, or the interaction between humans and things (like driving cars, eating meat) and institutions (like companies who pollute, or countries who refuse to sign up to climate change targets), that causes the problem, not just the raw number of people. For a classic example, Qatar and Nigeria produce roughly the same carbon dioxide emissions (about 87 kilotons in 2015). The former has a population of 2.5 million; the latter more than 188 million (World Bank 2016). Thinking about the future of population growth in sub-Saharan Africa through this lens looks rather different. In the same way that we have rethought the population paradigm in relation to growth and the environment, so, too, we must rethink the paradigm for aging and decline. Population aging is only a problem because the institutions in place cannot cope—or so we are told. This is surely the case for extant pension systems in both European and Pacific Asian territories. But aging is about a lot more than pensions. Yet again, I think we are thinking in a unidirectional way: ‘aging is bad, so let’s fix the causes’. I want to argue that we need to move away from this two-dimensional, demographically deterministic paradigm and
toward one that considers populations holistically. In other words, if we rethink and reconceptualize the problem itself, re-evaluate it in its own terms, we might be able to become a little more relaxed about the so-called ‘root’ causes. This also means we need to reconceptualize what aging and even being old actually is. By doing so, I think we might be able to concentrate more on making society better and rather less on chasing targets that may, ultimately, be rather meaningless.
We need to begin by stating categorically that increasing fertility is an inefficient way of addressing the economic, political, and cultural issues related to population aging. This needs to come out of a recognition that demographic change alone didn’t lead to economic growth and everything else that has happened over the past 50 years, and neither will demographic change alone lead to economic collapse. There’s plenty of other “tools in the shed.” By only thinking of demographic solutions to demographic problems, we are, I would suggest, completely setting ourselves up for a fall.
A THEORETICAL VACUUM
Demography is, as Dudley Kirk (1996, 361) once remarked, “a science short on theory.” Perhaps many readers will be familiar with demographic transition theory (see Coale 1984 for an explanation), which describes the relationship between declining mortality, fertility and population growth. Yet, the predictive power of demographic transition theory has been questioned by many authors for various reasons, especially in terms of having omitted an in-depth exploration of causal roles played by institutions not adequately explored in the original formulation (Teitelbaum 1975) (such as familial wealth flows; Barkow and Burley 1980). This is especially the case in the fifth, or post-transitional, epoch of very low fertility and mortality rates that we are generally concerned with in this book. As Kirk (1996, 387) notes, “In Western areas of low fertility we are moving into a post-transition era, where the old guidelines are no longer appropriate, an era in which much more attention will have to be given to raising fertility, rather than to lower it. . . . What happens after the transition is the most exciting problem in modern demography, for which transition theory can provide some guidance but few answers, as it is tied to a particular epoch of history.” This has led Lutz (2007, 16) to suggest that “the Demographic Transition paradigm . . . essentially has nothing to say about the future of fertility in Europe.” Clearly, the same view can hold for Asia. In other words, as Lutz (2007, 16) continues, “the social sciences as a whole have yet to come up with a useful theory to predict the future fertility level of post-Demographic Transition societies.”
Later in the book, I will refer to a few theories that are applied within demography—although whether a scientist in another field would call them theories is open to question. These theories have each, in their own way, been applied to the LFPA context to try to understand current low fertility and, in some
cases, predict the future. Each will be referred to throughout the book. The incomplete gender revolution theory, for example, posits that while women’s public sphere roles have changed beyond all recognition, in many settings expectations of them in the private sphere, or their domestic roles, have largely stayed the same (Goldscheider, Bernhardt, and Lappegård 2015; Esping-Andersen 2009). This mismatch is considered to be a key driver in shaping low fertility because the tension between these two roles is acted out in terms of the postponement, limiting, or eschewing of childbearing.
Two other theoretical threads within demography have been applied to the kind of low fertility settings we are exploring in this book. Each describes a set of societal circumstances that, in principle, not only characterize low fertility societies but may also serve to sustain such low fertility. The second demographic transition theory (Lesthaeghe 2010, 2014) posits that through the process of modernization, a former emphasis on basic material needs, such as income, work conditions, housing, children and adult health, schooling, social security, and an emphasis on solidarity, shifts toward a new emphasis on individual autonomy, expressive work and socialization values, self-actualization, grass-roots democracy, and recognition of the individual (Lesthaeghe 2014). This is linked, through other related mechanisms, to structural sub-replacement fertility.
Another theory, meanwhile, goes further. The low-fertility trap hypothesis posits that once a society has experienced a prolonged period of low fertility, a series of self-reinforcing mechanisms act to make any increase in fertility ever harder to achieve (Lutz, Skirbekk, and Testa 2006). These mechanisms come about through the economic and political effects of population aging, the demographic effect of fewer and fewer women of childbearing age, and, crucially for our understanding in this book, a normalization of smaller family sizes (and a societal adjustment toward that), as reflected in fertility preferences.
Bearing all of this in mind, I want to say a little something about the approach that I will be taking in the book. I am a demographer. But, I have come to the conclusion that an understanding of demography and demography theory (such as there is much theory) can only take us so far in trying to understand what is going on. As such, I have sought to employ some insights from other approaches and other disciplines. It is a little unusual, for example, for demographers to deploy qualitative data, but I will. It is also quite unusual for demographers to deploy late modern social theory. I have always thought this rather odd because theorists such as Anthony Giddens, Ulrich Beck, and Elizabeth Beck-Gernsheim have been quite preoccupied with the process of family formation and how this fits into other aspects of modern life.
According to Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, through the process of modernization, the function of the family has changed from a primarily economic orientation geared toward production. Within these processes, men and women have been active agents in shaping and reshaping their own identities within both the home and the wider world. Rather than living out the lives or biographies
that past institutions had designed for them, men and women have set out to organize their own biographies, with the goal of creating a life of one’s own. Women, for example, are theoretically cut free from their status fate (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 2002, 202) as housewives. This new capacity to design one’s own biography is termed individualization
Beck and Beck-Gernsheim also describe another ongoing transition in society contemporaneous to the move into—and out of—modernity as relating to risk (Beck 1992). Though this concept has been expanded and applied in a variety of contexts (e.g., the environment), at its heart is an understanding of the manner by which risk is pooled. Traditionally, risk is pooled at the familial level. Through the course of modernity (and the development, in some places, of the welfare state), risk is then pooled with the state and employers. Finally, in late- or post-modernity, when both the extended family and the big state take on a less active role in people’s lives, risk is transferred onto the shoulders of the individual. Of course, this transition is often closely aligned to shifts in individualization as described previously. Furthermore, the amount of time that this transition takes is critical to understanding how it can affect people. In many of the settings we explore, the concept of “compressed modernity” can be—and has been—applied (e.g., Chang 2010).
These two concepts of risk and individualization have already been applied to the Pacific Asian context in a number of important studies (e.g., Chan 2009), although the explicit application to demography has been rather scarce (see Hall 2002 for a notable exception).
A ROADMAP OF THE BOOK
In the first section of this chapter, I tried to set out a statement of principles about how I want to try to tackle the “problem part” of the population problem and to introduce a new way of thinking about it. Before I set about showing how I am going to achieve this, I want to justify a pretty major cleavage in the book. I have decided to consider China and the other low-fertility settings separately because the contexts of both fertility decline and possible responses now and in the future are, at least at face value, somewhat different. This is not to say that Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore, and South Korea are all the same. Absolutely far from it. But, the shared characteristics are such that the orthodox view in the literature is to consider these territories separately from China.
In this introductory chapter, I have only presented the population problem and the ensuing distribution of blame in a very superficial, maybe even glib way. It clearly requires a more in-depth exploration. In Chapter 2, therefore, I more formally set out the parameters of the population problem by describing just what it is that everyone is so worried about. I then describe the efforts that different governments have made to fix the supposed root of the problem, namely,
very low fertility. Given the arguably modest success of these policies, I then talk about who gets the blame for this: what are the presented reasons for this prolonged period of low fertility?
Having identified that low fertility—very broadly defined—is considered in most extant literature to be at the root of the population problem, in Chapter 3 I explore the recent changes in birth rates in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, and Japan in more depth. The point of this chapter is to move beyond the traditional two-dimensional presentation of fertility through the total fertility rate—which elicits a one-dimensional response, of simply trying to increase it. Rather, by considering a multidimensional approach by exploring how fertility transition actually occurred, through examining adjusted and cohort change as well as, critically, changes in the parity distribution of families, we can have a much better idea of how family structures have changed. In other words, to design a multidimensional population policy, we need to have at least a multidimensional understanding of the “problem”. The chapter concludes that the rise in zero/one-child families, coupled with the sharp decline in families with three or more children, is at the heart of the low-fertility paradigm. Finally, readers are reminded that fertility rates are little more than averages. What this means is that in societies where large families are rare, a policy that supports couples with one child to have another will only ever have a relatively modest effect on fertility if there is no net change in the number of people having no children at all. This chapter is demographic in nature, but completely nontechnical.
After Chapter 3 identifies what people have done and what people do, Chapter 4 sets out to explore what people would like to do. Earlier in this introduction and in Chapter 2, I set out how men and women of childbearing age are being blamed for the population problem and how this blame is depicted as selfishness, eschewing of a generational responsibly, and giving up on marriage and childbearing. Chapter 4, then, sets out to explore the extent to which this is or is not the case. Rather quickly, the evidence seems to point to the facts that not only are respondents to surveys keen on getting married and having children but also there is a strong two-child norm in the region. I argue that this gap has been construed as a “space” in which pronatalist policies can operate. This has been used as a justification for such policies that, arguably, are more geared toward meeting reproductive targets than self-actualization. However, if we think in a rights-based framework, it shows how people’s aspirations are being thwarted by malfunctioning institutions. We can see this in the way that ideals turn into intentions either because of prolonged periods of singledom or, in many cases, after the birth of the first child. In this vein, people haven’t given up on the idea of marriage and childbirth; it is just that circumstances got in the way. Rather than the selfish eschewing of generational responsibilities, this is more a case of thwarted dreams. Indeed, while the language of self-actualization is often used in the sense of lower fertility as a consequence of seeking alternative pleasures, we
