Chinese women have been sharing their experiences receiving phone calls from government workers and officials, during which they are asked invasive questions about family planning and whether or not they are pregnant.
This was mostly created by the one child policy that ran from 1979-2016, coupled with male child preference. In China, a male child is responsible for taking care of his own parents, while females are responsible for caring for their in-laws.
In large part yes, but younger generations are also not especially motivated to have kids when they already have to deal with a soul-crushing workplace (much worse than in the west).
There is one mega-union (the only permitted one) with officials appointed by the CCP. It's essentially a sham, like the non-CCP parties in Congress that are nominally a type of opposition but can never hold any real power.
And yes, it is ironic and sad. Nordic countries are more communist than China is. China doesn't even have truly free healthcare like Canada etc.
Chinese Unions are a joke, it is common practice that union preventatives would trying to convince you to be more understanding of your boss.
It's a well known joke that the only reason Chinese Union exists is to prevent real unions to form (you want a worker union? but we already have one, go talk to them).
At this point the culture had shifted to not value large families and so few even think it is possible while not having kids seems like a valid option. It takes years to shift this even with an effort to encourage kids.
Its' so bad that they stopped publishing unemployment rate few years back, there are many talks of university students where they have to fill form about their future plans and whether they already received job offers, the teachers would encourage them to open a online store and fill the form as store owner/self employed.
Makes me wonder whether they're expecting to lose a significant number of young men for some reason over the next few years as well. Gotta start planning for replacements early.
Honestly I don't think that is necessary to explain this. China is seeing the same issue as western countries with birth rates way below replacement, but it hardly has any of the immigration that mitigates it for (most of) Europe and North America. It's not easy for an economy to support an ever-increasing proportion of its population being retirees