The Forces Shaping Asia's Low Birth Rates

China, Japan, and South Korea are each confronting plummeting birthrates and  rapidly aging populations, each with worrying consequences for their economies, societies, and political futures.

What makes East Asia’s demographic decline different from that of the West? As women entered the workforce in Asia, how did they define and discover freedom and fulfillment between the expectations of the family and the workplace? And in China, how has the one- and two-child policies—and the parallel tide of economic reforms—reshaped desires in marriage and child-bearing among young adults?

Yun Zhou, a social demographer at the University of Michigan with a particular focus on family policy and gender in contemporary China, joins us.

Transcript

Chang: In May 2021, China rolled out its three-child policy, which allowed women to have three children without the fines and penalties associated with the previous two-child policy. It was in response to a deepening demographic crisis where birth rates have fallen well below replacement level. The problem is already visible in Japan and South Korea and increasingly in the United States and Europe.

The three-child policy also reveals the sometimes explicit ways that modern governments get preoccupied with the most intimate spheres of our lives—whether we have children or not—regardless of whether you’re in a liberal or autocratic government. Reproduction has been intimately connected to a state’s economic vitality, its financial health, and social stability. Given the intensity of the low birth rate problem in East Asia, the region is something of a bellwether for how Western governments might successfully—or unsuccessfully—respond to demographic decline.
Everyone is watching. 

To help us make sense of this landscape, we’re joined by Yun Zhou, a social demographer from the University of Michigan. Yun specializes in the demographics of East Asia. She’s currently writing a book about gender and population politics in China. We’re lucky to have you.

Yun: Thank you for having me.

Chang: So first, I wanted to ask if you could just talk a bit about your main research interests.

Yun:
So for me, the question has always been: What does it mean to be an independent, autonomous person with the possibility of living a life of one’s own when that life is constantly under the scrutiny and control of some kind of autocratic forces—be that government, be that the patriarchy, be that the market—and how do people, and women especially, carve out spaces for themselves?

Chang: So you mentioned that you’re interested in some of the ways that women are being restricted, either through patriarchy or autocratic authoritarian governments. That’s quite broad, and that makes me think that in some ways, that’s happening everywhere, right?

So I’m wondering: When you talk to other social demographers who focus on the United States and Europe, are you noticing anything that might be distinctive when you look at specifically China, Japan, and Korea—these three countries that have been influenced by Confucian culture? Is there anything that stands out to you looking at those three countries relative to the West?

Yun: One thing that I think is quite distinctive, especially to China, is the place of the market. How do these women, in particular, see themselves in relation to market forces? For example, when we talk about neoliberal democracies, a lot of the social critiques come around the social ills that are engendered by the unencumbered forces of market advances. And we kind of see the state’s social provisions as a kind of solution to that. But when we talk about China, in particular, it becomes quite interesting how these women see the market as kind of a way in which it becomes a countervailing force to the patriarchal family demand.

So it becomes almost like, by being engaged in the market and being, quote-unquote, “commodified,” one at least gets herself out of the dependence on family for life, for her livelihood.

Ian: But when you say “commodified,” you mean that women get jobs and become part-players in the marketplace and therefore less dependent on men and family relationships?

Yun: Absolutely. And they see jobs and they see employment as kind of the ticket out. So when Chinese women, in particular, talk about the incompatibility between childbearing and work, there is a strong sense of not wanting to jeopardize one’s career, and there is a strong sense about labor market discrimination being front and center in their calculations about whether and when to have children.

Another thing that’s interesting about China, Japan, and South Korea is women viewing childbearing—or the retreat from childbearing—with a kind of feminist ethos: whether this possibly could be a way of rejecting the heteronormative patriarchy. Could the very private act of having or not having children, entering or not entering into heterosexual marriages, could these very private acts—within the context of China, Japan, South Korea being deeply patriarchal—could these private acts become an act of resistance? And that is something that I think is particularly salient and striking about the East Asian context as we are observing.

Ian: But I think I read something that you wrote about this, and you made the point that men—and we’re talking about educated people, obviously—but that men in China, and possibly in other countries in East Asia, were more keen than women to live together before they get married, and that men didn’t seem to find it all that important whether it would end in marriage or not. Whereas women did, and women did want to see even cohabitation as a way to get married. Is this the case, and why would you think that’s true?

Yun: Yeah, that’s a paper that I wrote a couple years ago about how women and men attach different meanings to cohabitation. And one of the backgrounds for that paper was: Oftentimes, people think about changing families and whether family has become in some way deinstitutionalized, meaning that the norms and the scripts and the rules surrounding family are becoming less solidified.

One of the telltale signs of family becoming deinstitutionalized is there is a rise of cohabitation, and people kind of see cohabitation as either a replacement of marriage or a precursor to marriage. But in any case, cohabitation becomes more prevalent, and that’s indeed kind of the story that we see from the United States, North America, Western European context.

But in China, what was interesting was: On the one hand, there is somewhat uptick in cohabitation, but still men and women are attaching deeply contradictory meanings to cohabitation. They see cohabitation so differently. 

So for men, it was indeed that cohabitation—it would be nice to cohabit and test out whether the marriage can be compatible—but it’s not really a big deal if cohabitation falls apart. Basically, the men see themselves as really having not much to lose. 

Whereas for women, there’s—despite these being highly educated women, despite these being women who have more or less liberalizing attitudes toward cohabitation—still they see themselves as having something to lose. That something could be reputational damage. And very interestingly, a lot of the concerns and hesitation surrounding reputation was about unplanned pregnancies and disease.

So for those women who then decide to cohabit, the stake was higher. And for those women who then do decide to cohabit, there was a strong incentive about: This cohabitation has to lead somewhere. So it kind of tells a story that, despite the liberalizing attitude and behavior surrounding cohabitation, the underlying gender scripts are still deeply entrenched and strong.

Chang: So I wanted to get to this because I think that this is probably—from my experience—it seems like this is a really big difference between the West and these East Asian countries, which is that this kind of rigid nuclear family seems to be still relatively prevalent, even among young people. I think in the US, it’s become—I think there was a statistic that says that 40% of all births in the US are to unmarried women, and those numbers are in the low single digits in East Asia.

So that’s a really big difference. It seems to be getting to what you’re saying, which is that in East Asia, these different kinds of arrangements—like cohabitation, having a child out of wedlock, maybe even adoption, right?—these aren’t as prevalent. Do you think that difference also explains why birth rates are lower in East Asia compared to the West? I think they are slightly lower, but I think the US and Europe are also catching up.

Yun: The picture of cohabitation, childbearing, and marriage in the US is deeply complicated by differences by social class, by ethnic-racial lines, by immigration status, by religion and religiosity, so on and so forth. It’s really interesting. You mentioned that because I teach a course for undergrads at the University of Michigan on gender and marriage.

And one of the course activities that we always do at the beginning of the class is: I ask students to write down three words that they would associate with marriage. So these are American college students, and then we do a word cloud based on the answers that they come up with every time. And again, in all the iterations that I’ve taught the class, people associate with marriage—the three words that kind of jump out to them—are commitment, love, and children. So you kind of still do see that this social norm that links marriage and childbearing might not be as porous or tenuous in the US as we might assume.

But one commonality among US adults, Chinese young adults, Japanese young adults, and South Korean young adults is: Oftentimes, we kind of think about people’s retreat from marriage, from childbearing, as this grand ideation or shift that people are actively—their desires about family lives, their aspirations about the future have fundamentally shifted somehow.

But there is another layer to it: A lot of times, the lack of marriage that we observe on the aggregate level, or the decline of fertility that we observe on the aggregate level, also reflect a sense of unmet desire. In other words, the desire for marriage, the desire for a two-child family, the desire for having children—it’s remarkably sticky, but oftentimes, time, finances, those kinds of constraints, job market, labor market gender discrimination—those kinds of practical constraints get in the way.

Ian: Don’t you think that these things change also a little bit with time? For example, there was a period in the ‘60s and ‘70s in Japan. But in Japan, one reason why many women started resisting marriage was not only because of the patriarchal relationships and having to wait up until midnight until your husband comes home drunk from company parties and that kind of thing. But it was also because people often lived in extended families still. Many young married women would be bullied by their mothers-in-law. There was a great move then to start nuclear families in small apartments, which led to different problems of loneliness, secretive drinking, and that kind of thing.

So it’s not just patriarchy, is it? There are other social reasons why the more educated women become, the more they shy away from the traditional family arrangements.

Yun: One could make an argument that those multi-generational co-residences—residing with both parents before one’s marriage—is precisely symptomatic of the patriarchy.

Ian: Can you explain that? Why do you think that?

Yun: So for young adults to be well on the way to independence, it necessitates one’s own family, and before having that, one is still seen as a part of this extended family.

So again, family is very much built around heterosexual marriages, family is very much built around a certain kind of—not necessarily equal—power dynamics between parent and child relationships, family built around having children as one of the core functions of family. One could make the argument that the imaginary of family in that way is precisely symptomatic of the patriarchy.

Ian: Yes, I see your point entirely, but I think fewer and fewer people now live in those extended families, certainly in Japan and possibly in South Korea, too. And yet the problem persists. Even now that more and more people live in nuclear families—or more and more we’re shying away from getting married.

Yun: Part of the reasons for that is: Think about the conflict or the incompatibility that women—especially highly educated women—now must negotiate with family demands on the one hand and workplace demands on the other.

So these are also three countries that we see increase at different levels, to different extents, in women’s labor force participation. China, in particular, given its socialist legacy, there is a relatively high level of labor force participation among women. For these women, then, the question becomes: How do I balance the demands of being a good mother with the demands from employers, the demands of being an ideal or a good worker? So for women, in particular, these are the constraints that they navigate. 

And for men—for East Asian men as well—the norm about a good, responsible, worthy East Asian man is a man who can be the breadwinner, who can provide. This kind of breadwinner norm is remarkably sticky and salient in China, in South Korea, in Japan. And that plays a certain kind of constraints on men and on men’s time as well. The expectations of being breadwinners, being ideal workers, being working long hours, working overtime, vis-à-vis the desire and expectations of undertaking an equal share of housework and childcare. This kind of work-family conflict—it manifests in women’s and men’s lives, and that kind of contradiction and conflict becomes one of the crucial constraints when people make calculations and strategize about whether they want to have children and how many children they want to have.

Chang: Can I get you to just clarify something that you said about unmet desire. What I take that to mean is that let’s just say in China, a lot of young women in China will say that they may still have a kind of idealized hope of having to marry and have kids, but because of more pragmatic reasons like housing costs, education, and maybe just the gender roles within the family—those expectations—they’re not able to; it’s sort of delayed. That happens in America as well. I know that’s certainly the case in America, but I’m wondering: To what extent is this idea of like the unmet desire is distinct? Is there any way that’s unique to East Asia? Are you suggesting that in the United States and Europe, maybe the idea is changing—like people have different kinds of ideals? It’s more maybe pluralistic?

Yun: The two-child ideal is actually highly salient in the US, in Southern European low-fertility countries, and in East Asian low-fertility countries. Oftentimes, in surveys, we ask people: In an ideal setting, how many children, ideally, would you like to have? Demographers call that fertility ideal. And time and again, we observe people across gender lines, across social class lines, across educational levels answer two as their fertility ideal. You see that in China, or in survey data on China, too. And in interviews, they would specify that they really want a boy and a girl, a daughter and a son.

This unmet desire is actually quite universal—or at least it’s not idiosyncratic to the East Asian context. But what drives or what prohibits people from meeting their desire, that is variable across social context. For example, in studies on the US, or studies on Southern European low-fertility countries, oftentimes scholars focus on financial uncertainty as one of the key drivers of this unmet desire.

Whereas in the East Asian context, scholars—myself included—often highlight gender inequality, or work-family conflict, and gender discrimination in the labor market as one of the key drivers of this unmet desire.

Ian: Can I challenge you a bit more to talk a bit more about the patriarchy? Because again, in something I find fascinating about Japan is: Some decades ago, Korean soap operas became hugely popular in Japan. And one of the reasons women liked them, as I understand it, is that Korean men seemed to Japanese women still to be like real men, whereas their own Japanese partners seemed to them often rather wimpish in comparison—and men who needed to be mothered all the time, which was a role that again educated women—certainly ones who had jobs and so on—really didn’t feel like doing any longer.

The notion of the patriarch as this sort of manly figure who provides for the family and so on—may be slightly out of date. Certainly in Japan, that seems to be the case.

Yun: Japanese men still work some of the longest hours. As we look at work hours in this East Asian context, and we look at the share of housework hours, it’s still predominantly women in all of these East Asian contexts that we are talking about.

But what you are saying is really interesting because it gets at the question of: What exactly is masculinity, and what exactly are the masculinity standards in these contexts, and are there changes in these masculinity standards across time and across these geographic spaces?

It’s also really interesting that you mentioned the South Korean TV shows and dramas because one of the interesting kind of developments or news in China over the past few years was this idea of trying to project a certain kind of masculinity among Chinese men that rejects a version of men being quote-unquote “wimpy”—so that the idea of Chinese men really should step up and be quote-unquote “a real man,” and that is based on a certain kind of masculinity ideal that is more or less congruent with what we typically think of what masculinity is.

Chang: You mentioned the difference—or that the gender divide, at least around labor distribution and others, are changing in Japan, presumably China, but I’m actually wondering: To what extent that’s true? Like, when you study this, are sociologists thinking there’s been a lot of liberalization in the family, or is it more of like a kind of stubbornness? Is that considered something that’s relatively not keeping pace with other kinds of social, economic changes for example.

Yun: Sociologists are infamous for often ending their punchline with, “Well, that’s complicated.” In some ways, there is profound social transformation in these contexts, right? There are rising female educational attainment, and in South Korea, in particular, there is this profound shift to some preference toward female [sic] offspring. And in China, social, economic development, all that. 

But on the other hand, gender in the family becomes some of the last institutions that are still operating within profoundly heteronormative norms. So the question often becomes: What is the mismatch between socioeconomic liberalization on the one hand and the lack of gender egalitarianism on the other?

So there’s always this tension: On the one hand, we see rising female educational attainment, but particularly in the case of China, women now outperform their male counterparts in tertiary education. But after college education, there still remains a gender gap in employability. There still remains a gender gap in who gets hired. So you do see these kinds of imbalance between progress on the one hand and a stalling on the other.

Ian: I think that’s absolutely right. But if you look at the West—and most Western European countries, in the United States—more and more, there are alternative ways to have children and have families. You have gay couples who adopt children. You have more single mothers, and so on, and it is becoming more and more acceptable to do that. Why do you think East Asian countries are lagging in that respect? You yourself have written about the lack of tolerance towards same-sex relationships in China. And I think perhaps to a slightly lesser extent, but I think that’s probably true in Japan and South Korea too. What is your explanation? Why are these things not evolving as quickly as they seem to have in Western countries?

Yun: In the case of China, there’s the elephant in the room, that is the party-state and the party-state’s politics, family, and population policies. And in the case of China, family policies deeply revolve around heterosexual marriages. Parental benefits often are predicated upon heterosexual marriages. Childbearing is often regulated through heterosexual marriages. To the extent of: Is there space, and there is development in, for example, same-sex marriage and LGBTQ+ rights? East Asian societies are also not necessarily monolithic.

So one of the developments in Japan is, for example, certain parts of Tokyo, the recognition of same-sex unions that at least provide a semblance of legal protections for those couples. And in the case of China, attitudes towards same-sex unions, toward same-sex sexual behaviors, are also evolving. And that pattern of change follows what we would expect as we’ve observed of how social progress happens: You see younger individuals have more liberalized attitudes. You see people with higher educational attainment have more liberal attitudes. You see people who are more supportive of women’s equal rights also have more liberalized attitudes toward LGBTQ+ rights. In that sense, non-normative families and how these non-normative families are seen—or attitudes toward these non-normative families—those are quite heterogeneous within the East Asian context as well.

Chang: How do you think about the sheng nu—”leftover women”—in Chinese, and the “leftover men” problem in China?

So the way that I understand it is: One of the really big changes in Chinese society, along with its economic rise, has been its educational attainment. And it’s been especially pronounced in women. I think you had told me earlier that there’s this tendency for women to, or maybe pressure, for women to ”date up.” And so as women get more and more educated, the size of their options narrows, and this leaves kind of an imbalance on either side, right? I’m just really curious how you think about that issue in China.

Yun: As a social demographer, three of my favorite terms—which are a mouthful to say—are homogamy, hypergamy, and hypogamy. Homogamy refers to marriage sorting patterns that happen when women and men are of similar social standings or similar socioeconomic standings. Hypergamy refers to a situation where, as you said, women quote-unquote “date up” or “marry up,” and hypogamy is the reverse—that refers to the pattern where women quote-unquote “marry down” or “date down.”

And in China, in Japan, in South Korea, predominantly the marriage sorting patterns are largely homogamous and largely hypergamous. Again, the predominant pattern is the similar marrying similar, and women tend to marry up. You can imagine in a society that is the dominant marriage sorting pattern, then there really is a mismatch between the quote-unquote “leftover women” vis-à-vis the quote-unquote men who are squeezed out of the marriage market.

And in China, the picture is further complicated by the deeply imbalanced sex ratio, which is a result and a legacy of the one-child policy, which resulted in sex-selective abortion, abandonment, and the maltreatment of baby girls.

So in the case of China, given that, first of all, the sex ratio is deeply imbalanced, and second of all, marriage sorting is still largely either homogamous and hypergamous—then you do see actually the “leftover women,” despite the attention that we tend to give to this issue—it’s really the men who are disadvantaged in terms of their socioeconomic status. And to some extent, that is also the pattern in Japan as well. Then the question becomes: Why do we still see these prevalent marriage sorting patterns that follow the line of homogamy and hypergamy? And that goes back to what we talked about earlier about how do we think about masculinity in these contexts, and what are the expectations? And central to those expectations is this demand of a worthy, a productive, a quote-unquote “good man” being a good breadwinner.

Ian: Could you see a future in which educated and successful women start behaving more and more like the patriarchal men in the past? And what I mean is this: Can you conceive of women who are successful and have enough money and so on wanting to have a male companion or a male partner who is attractive and a little younger and who could take care of the household and perhaps cook, but would not be of the same educational standard or class?

Yun: That’s a really interesting thought experiment, but to push back a little bit: We have seen the rise in women’s education across the world. Given that context, what we are also seeing is what sociologists like Paula England would call a “stalled gender revolution”—meaning women’s entry into the labor market, women’s entry into higher education, that is not matched by men’s entry into the private sphere as co-caregivers.

So women indeed nowadays are increasingly becoming co-breadwinners, but the changes in men’s behavior has not kept pace. So this results in what sociologists often like to call the “unfinished” or the “stalled gender revolution.” 

And to some demographers, indeed, the question becomes: Given the changes in educational composition by gender, does that lead to changes in marriage patterns? Does that increase the likelihood of hypogamy given just who are available in the marriage market—who they are and what kind of educational background they have—or does it lead to different kinds of family and marriage decision-making?

And my answer to that is: People make decisions about marriage; people make decisions about dating based on a multitude of reasons that are often not necessarily fully reducible to the mathematical composition of the marriage market—that is not fully reducible to a purely rational choice decision-making model. And who we see as an ideal spouse, and what we want from marriage, and what kind of parent we want to be—those are deeply ingrained within the cultural, normative, social context that we live out our lives.

So it kind of becomes psychological in that: Without a norm change, will we see behavioral change? And once behavioral change reaches a certain tipping point, perhaps they will bring about a norm change. I don’t necessarily have a very clear answer.

Chang: I was wondering whether we could move on to the topic of what the state is trying to do to raise birth rates. Obviously, this has been a big issue for the past couple of years, and in 2024, China said it was gonna raise the retirement age for about two years. I think it was from 60 to 63 over the next 15 years.

And then this summer, there’s been like a national effort in July for childcare subsidies, which are about ¥3,600—so $500, I think. I wanted to just ask you: Is this working? Is this useful? How do you think about Chinese policy to raise—what is it like “pro-natalist policies”? And in general are they effective?

Yun: In general, giving people cash in the hope that they will have more children does not produce more children. So China has undergone a series of pro-natalist policy shifts since 2016 with the universal two-child policy. So right after the universal two-child policy came into effect in 2016, there was a very—ever so slight—uptick in the number of new births, and that is oftentimes attributable to people who previously had an unmet desire in having two children—now got a chance and had two children. That boost was since absent all through the universal relaxation of the two-child policy, universal relaxation of the three-child policy, and a series of central and/or local government subsidies.

The current subsidies that was just rolled out, for those who already have children, these subsidies are indeed embraced. But these kinds of subsidies also hardly move the needle in changing people’s ideas.

Ian: I’m not sure I entirely understand because you made the case that one barrier towards having children—or towards getting married at all—was the financial one; that it was too expensive for many people. So why wouldn’t the fact that there are cash incentives and that could make it more affordable—why wouldn’t that work better?

Yun: Because the financial barriers and the financial burdens and obstacles that these people—these young adults—experience and express are on a much larger scale than $500 or ¥3,600 a year. 

So when young Chinese adults talk about financial barriers, they think about all the costs that go into raising a child that would ensure this child to at least not experience downward social mobility as they grow up—all the extracurricular activities or the schooling fees or the enrichment activities. Those go way beyond what childcare subsidies as they stand now can provide.

Chang: I had a question about political polarization, so there was this Financial Times article in January that was talking about how globally we’re seeing women and men polarize in different directions in politics—that men are becoming more conservative and women are becoming more liberal. And this is just so obvious to me in the Chinese context. It’s crazy. Like, when you see online the feminists battling the nationalists, I guess it’s just a very obvious thing that’s happening in China and everywhere.

And I was wondering whether you might have like a sociological demographic perspective on that.

Yun: I know in the US context, there is also changes in how political—how salient political ideology is nowadays as people seek out potential partners. In the Chinese context, I do see this—again, this goes back to our earlier discussions about the “stalled gender revolution,” about how women’s advancement in the public sphere far outpaces men’s entry into the private sphere as co-caregivers. 

At the end of the day, I think the stalled gender revolution might be the most apt and prescient sociological theorization and analysis that helps us understand this kind of polarization: As half of the population is moving toward one direction, and the progress of that is not matched by the other half. And you would see that ending in a certain kind of polarization.

Chang:
Yun, I wanted to get your thoughts on one thing. So I was wondering whether you could just talk a little bit about the idea of not having children—or choosing not to have children—as an act of political protest. This was something that was quite viral during the pandemic lockdowns. There was a scene in Shanghai of health workers who were representing this young couple, where they said: “If you don’t come with us to a quarantine center, we’re gonna take you; you’re gonna be punished, and your kids will be punished, and the rest of your younger generations will be punished.”

And the couple responds: “We’re the last generation,” and just slams the door—and that became really viral because it seemed to suggest that there was this kind of interest in not having kids as a way of sort of reacting to government policy. Do you see that in your interviews, or is that something that’s maybe a little bit more peripheral to what’s really going on?

Yun: I see that to some extent, in my interviews—as parents or as prospective parents talking about not wanting their children to face the similar pressure or dilemma or uncertainty that they are facing now. And another interesting parallel observation that is just happening is: As you may know, Taylor Swift got engaged.

And on Chinese social media, I saw young Chinese women feeling really disappointed in her. This idea of: this is a female or woman idol that they adored and listened to and loved, also entering heterosexual marriage—and it’s almost a sense of betrayal, and some do use the word “betrayal.” To me, that was really interesting as how young women kind of think about marriage and think about heterosexual marriage and think about its rejection.

And then in the South Korean context, it was the 4B movement—this rejection of heterosexual sex, heterosexual marriage, heterosexual dating, and heterosexual childbearing—as kind of almost a way to reject—to embrace a certain kind of feminist ideal.

And if you think about it, also there is a certain kind of echo as we think about, for example, Adrienne Rich when she wrote about kind of lesbianism and compulsory heterosexuality and what is possibly a feminist utopia. And I think at the end of the day, it’s really marriage and sex and childbearing and dating and love. Those are thorny issues, and people just all come at it viewing them with different meanings. And certainly there isn’t necessarily one vision or one version of a feminist utopia. But we do see in the case of East Asia—and in the case of contemporary China—as young women trying to figure out what they want, and as they’re trying to figure out whether and how equality can be possible, we see different methods of trying, and we see different solutions and different experiments being proposed.

Chang:
So this has been generally like a pretty sad topic around just like a lack of having less kids and societies that are going through demographic crisis. I was wondering whether there was anything—in any trends in East Asia, specifically in China—that you found optimistic, like any signs of trends that are changing or something that was surprising to you.

Yun:
I have a two-part answer to that. First, there is a promising or optimistic trend that is very straightforward: We do see fathers becoming more involved in childcare in China nowadays compared to previous generations. So that’s a very straightforward optimistic outlook. Women still shoulder the lion’s share of housework and care work, but men’s involvement in childcare in China—at least the ideal of it—is indeed increasing somewhat.

And the second part to it is: I do not necessarily see fertility decline as a problem, or I do not necessarily problematize it in a way that is typically problematized—for example, population policies.

Fundamentally, one of the most optimistic things about human nature is this desire to live free and this desire to live as one’s own person—this desire to have a life of one’s own. And we do see that desire coming out and manifested in people’s changing decision-making about family.

So in some sense, a retreat from marriage and a retreat from childbearing can also bring a certain kind of optimism to it if we stop and ponder about: What are these people saying, and what are these people aspiring to? And we realize it’s an aspiration toward freedom, toward independence, and toward autonomy.

Chang:
Okay, all right thank you!

Ian:
Thank you very much.

Yun:
Thank you for having me. This is a really fun conversation.