The reproductive climate concerns of young, educated Chinese: ‘when the nest is upset, no egg is left intact’

ABSTRACT

An emerging area of research concerns the phenomenon of young people factoring climate change into their reproductive plans and choices, but existing scholarship and popular discourse have focused exclusively on Western and developed countries. This paper examines whether young people in China are also connecting their reproductive plans and choices to climate change, and why. Based on the quantitative and qualitative results from an exploratory survey of 173 young, educated, climate-alarmed or climate-concerned Chinese, we found that reproductive climate concerns are reported by many young Chinese. Respondents expressed deep and multi-layered concerns about the wellbeing of their (potential) children in a climate-changed future, though they did not rank climate change highly among other factors that might influence their reproductive choices. Climate-alarmed Chinese reported lower levels of reproductive climate concerns and more positive visions of the future than a similar group of US-Americans. We attribute these findings to China’s history of family planning, state-constructed climate discourse, stage of development, and hierarchical cultural worldview. As the first study on reproductive climate concerns in Asia, this research addresses a major gap in our knowledge, with implications for the sociology of climate change, the sociology of reproduction, environmental psychology, Asian studies, and demography.

KEYWORDS:

• Climate change
• reproduction
• China
• cross-cultural
• future

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to extend their gratitude and acknowledge the generous assistance of Farheen Asim, Angela Ferguson, Jin Hee Lee, Ayo Wahlberg, Zheng Zhang, editor Catherine Wong, and the two anonymous reviewers.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/23251042.2022.2132629

Notes

1. While a complete analysis of relevant discourse in Chinese media is not possible in this space, searches on Baidu and Google with the keywords ‘气候变化’ or ‘气候焦虑’ paired with either ‘生育选择’ or ‘要不要孩子’ yielded five relevant posts from these news channels, all published after May 2021.

2. Ethics approval was granted by Yale-NUS College’s Departmental Ethics Review Committee (number 00016329), with a Statement of Concurrence by the National University of Singapore’s Institutional Review Board.

3. SASSY is a short, widely-used, publicly-available tool to categorize different levels of climate concern. As the items in the survey do not contain any country-specific information, it is applicable beyond its original (US-American) context, and has been used by other researchers to investigate and categorize public perceptions of climate change beyond the US (e.g. Neumann et al. 2022).

4. According to the SASSY tool, the Alarmed segment captures individuals who are most convinced that anthropogenic climate change is occurring and actively engaged with the issue. The other segments include individuals with ‘lower sense of urgency or certainty about the problem, and tend to display lower personal and political engagement’ (Chryst et al. 2018, 3).

5. Pseudonyms are used for all respondents.

6. The demographic dividend is the economic growth potential that occurs when the share of the working-age population (15 to 64) is larger than the non-working-age share of the population. In China, the one-child policy increased the demographic dividend by increasing the percentage of the working-age population. This dividend and its economic benefits have been diminishing as the population ages and China’s fertility rate remains low.

7. This is translated from a popular proverb, ‘覆巢焉有完卵’, which the respondent used.

8. The original phrasing in Chinese is: ‘您认为2050年的世界会是什么样子?请从经济、社会、环境的角度,尽可能详细地描述一下。’

9. The original phrasing was ‘环保素质’ (‘suzhi’ or environmental protection). A term with many connotations, ‘suzhi’ was used in the family planning campaign to describe the ‘quality’ of the population; it also refers to the ‘disposition’ of individuals.

10. This sample was composed entirely of Americans who were young and climate-alarmed. Like the Chinese sample, it was highly educated and mostly female.

11. Likert scales are treated as continuous variables here. Mean and standard deviations are used to describe their central tendencies.

12. Despite this framing, which is similar to one of the core tenets of environmental ethics and the climate justice movement, ‘intergenerational justice’ is a very recent concept in Chinese political discourse. The spatial fairness of development and pollution has been focused on more than the intergenerational effects of environmental problems. This might explain the lower level of concern for their children’s future among the climate-alarmed Chinese relative to the US sample.

13. 8-4-2-3 refers to a family structure in which two adults have 8 grandparents, 4 parents, and 3 children.

14. However, it should be noted that a gulf between climate intentions and climate actions has been observed in many places. See, for example, Ipsos 2021.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Yale-NUS College.

Notes on contributors

Xiyao Fu

Xiyao Fu is a Master of Environmental Science student at the Yale School of the Environment. She obtained her bachelor’s degree in Environmental Studies from Yale-NUS College, where she conducted the primary research for this paper. Her research interests include the sociology of climate change and critical food and agrarian studies, with a focus on China.

Matthew Schneider-Mayerson

Matthew Schneider-Mayerson is Associate Professor of English at Colby College. Previously, he was Associate Professor of Environmental Studies at Yale-NUS College and the Cultures of Energy Postdoctoral Fellow at Rice University. He is the author of Peak Oil: Apocalyptic Environmentalism and Libertarian Political Culture and editor of An Ecotopian Lexicon and Eating Chilli Crab in the Anthropocene: Environmental Perspectives on Life in Singapore.

Marvin Joseph F. Montefrio

Marvin Joseph F. Montefrio is an Associate Professor of Social Science (Environmental Studies) at Yale-NUS College, Singapore. His main research interest is critical food and agrarian studies, with a focus on the political economy and cultural politics of food sustainability in Southeast Asia.