Hoping for a dragon child

I was born in the January of 1988, shortly before the Lunar New Year. It was the end of the Year of the Rabbit, or, as my parents call it, the “rabbit tail.” As a child, I looked enviously at peers who had the fortune of arriving into the world months later, and were thus born in the Year of the Dragon, the single most auspicious sign in the zodiac calendar.

Growing up as Dragon children—or as someone like me, whose birth date was close enough for me to cross various life milestones with them—has indeed been a blessing, if a mixed one. The Year of the Dragon only comes once every 12 years, and in 1988 led to a baby boom in Chinese cities, where the competition for social resources was already cut-throat. In elementary and middle school, my class was the largest ever in the school’s history. In 2006, the year they took the national college entrance exam, the number of applicants in Beijing rose by more than 10 per cent, to 110,000, while the college admission quota remained the same. The squeeze continued as they entered the job market in 2010, when a quarter of the 6.3m college graduates of the year failed to land jobs.

Shortly after the Dragon boom, China’s fertility rate began to dip. A combination of factors, including a stricter enforcement of the one-child policy, rising living costs, and women’s changing social status, drove couples to have fewer children. According to the most recent census in 2010, China’s fertility rate has fallen to 1.08, almost the world’s lowest. It so alarmed policymakers in Beijing that they decided in early November to further relax the one-child policy: couples will soon be able to have two children if either parent is a single child. (Before the rule change, both parents had to be a single child to be allowed two children.)

The loosening of the one-child policy couldn’t have come sooner, experts say, given the slew of problems it has already created in today’s China, including a shrinking workforce, an unsustainable healthcare system, and a skewed sex ratio as a result of gender-selective abortions. On a personal level, the government’s interference with family planning decisions is a reminder of an era when the state controlled the private lives of every citizen, memories that the Chinese are eager to leave behind.

Parents have welcomed the change with open arms. But many, having grown up as single children themselves, are also quick to see the future in practical terms. “Once the policy is in place, it will create another baby boom,” one web user reflected on Weibo, the Chinese social media platform, similar to Twitter. “Think about the squeeze they will face at school, in the college entrance exam, in the job market, in the real estate market, and even in the marriage market. Sigh!”

Despite China’s declining birthrate, the competition among the younger generation for social resources is more intense than ever. The expanding size of the Chinese middle class means more families are lavishing an increasing amount of wealth and attention on their children, or, as the Chinese idiom goes, “hoping for a dragon child.” The young, more educated and ambitious than their parents, are attending crammer schools, flocking to universities at home and abroad, filling white-collar jobs, and snapping up posh apartments in unprecedented numbers. Still, many find their dream of a cushy middle-class life difficult to afford, and feel they are losing face.

In the past decade, China’s heavy investment in human capital has quadrupled the number of college graduates, whereas its job sector is still dominated by manufacturing and construction. How to create an economy that accommodates the swelling ranks of educated Chinese youth, provides them with comprehensive social welfare and turns them into tax-paying consumers is one of the greatest challenges faced by leaders. The long-awaited loosening of the one-child policy, which experts predict could add one to two million to China’s 15m annual births, further raises the stakes of the government’s reform agenda. When the next Year of the Dragon rolls around in 2024, hopeful parents will be looking to introduce their children to a world where they’ll be blessed with opportunities, instead of trapped in rat races.