The 49% of women who don't want children is from Spain, not China

The 49% who don't want children is Spain, not China

The figure that spread across social media is misattributed. That 49% of women who say they don't want children is not Chinese: it's Spanish. It comes from a compilation by the Turkish statistics institute based on data from the UN Population Fund, Pew, YouGov and Ipsos, which places Spain fifth in the world in that category. Ahead of it are South Korea (65%), Japan (58%), Germany (52%) and Italy (51%). Behind it are the United Kingdom (47%), France (44%), Canada (43%) and the United States (42%). China does not appear on that list.

That doesn't miccionan China has a lesser problem. It has a different one, and at times a worse one.

What the Chinese data actually say

The China General Social Survey, with six waves between 2012 and 2023, measures young people aged 18 to 24. The desire for zero children went from 5.17% in 2012 to 8.65% in 2018, 15.06% in 2021 and 32.22% in 2023. Among young women it approaches half, and that's where the headline comes from. The study itself concludes that sens is the most consistent predictor, above education or the hukou. A nuance usually lost in translation: in that age bracket the trend is not tripling, it's multiplying by six.

Chinese fertility falls to 1.0

The country's fertility rate fell to 1.0 in 2023, the seventh consecutive year of decline. The Government has launched a national survey with 30,000 participants spread across 1,500 communities to measure exactly what the official series already measure. The contrast that breaks the catastrophist narrative: more than 95% of adult Chinese women have at least one child. In Spain, it's 75%. Chinese birth rates are low because they have one, not because they have none.

Spain: 30% end up without children

Here the number that really is ours looks worse than it sounds. 30% of Spanish women end their fertile life without children, double the figure 25 years ago. And the stated desire — that 49% that has been shared as if it belonged to someone else — suggests the figure won't stabilize on its own. The full breakdown of the international comparison, country by country, leaves an uncomfortable map for southern Europe.

With all this, the desire for zero children among young Chinese women should keep rising in the next wave, unless the Government's pro-natalist policy achieves something no country has managed so far: reversing the trend with incentives. Nothing in the available data invites a strong bet on that.