Taiwan has long lived with the terrifying prospect of invasion by neighbouring China, but one of the biggest threats to its economic security and prosperity of its society lies from within – the lowest birth rates in the world.
January brought the gloomy news that the population of the East Asian country had fallen for a second year in a row in 2021, to a level not seen since 2013. Statistics released by the Ministry of the Interior (MOI) showed the population dropped by 185,922 from 2020 to 23,375,314.
While this can be explained in part by negative net emigration, exacerbated by the pandemic, another significant factor was that the 183,732 deaths on the island far exceeded 153,820 births.
The number of babies born was another worrying all-time low, reflecting a trend that appears to be irreversible and a source of much handwringing by the government as Taiwan hurtles towards “super-aged” status by 2025, meaning that one in five citizens will be aged over 65.
Taiwan, alongside South Korea and Japan, has for years lingered at the bottom of the global fertility charts, ranking last in 2021 among 227 countries and regions recorded by the US Central Intelligence Agency, with just 1.07 births per woman, far below the 2.1 needed to maintain its population.
At current rates, the National Development Council, Taiwan’s national policy-planning agency, predicts the over-65 demographic could reach 30 per cent by 2040 and the population will plummet to under 20m by 2052, raising the burden on the pensions and healthcare systems and creating labour force shortages.
As young people struggle with low wages, unaffordable house prices and work pressures that create an unfriendly environment for families, a visible sign of the reluctance to have children is the stark rise in pet ownership.
In September 2020, analysts estimated the number of domestic pets – about 3 million – had surpassed the number of children under the age of 15. The sale of pet accessories had a parallel boom, and now on the streets of Taipei, prams are often more likely carry dogs than babies.
Lin Ching Yi’s double role as a gynecologist and a member of the Legislative Yuan, Taiwan’s parliament, puts her at the forefront of grappling with the demographic timebomb, and she believes the government needs to find more creative solutions than promoting family values and financial incentives for having children.
“I think we can’t reverse the situation, we can only stop it from getting worse… it’s impossible in Taiwan to have any policy to encourage women to have on average two or three children," she told The Telegraph.
A 2019 survey of women aged 15 to 64 conducted by Taiwan's Ministry of Health and Welfare found that 38.6% of women said they were uninterested in marriage, up from 12.4% in 2011, reported Nikkei Asia.
Ms Lin said there were deeply entrenched cultural reasons why young, educated women with good jobs were rejecting the idea of marriage and children.
These included conservative family values that placed the burden of household duties on wives and mothers, with those expectations extending to responsibility for also caring for her husband’s family.
“We still have a very traditional culture,” she said. “We have just finished our Lunar New Year, when you go to your mother-in-law’s family to serve them and all the family.”
She added: “For women, the problem is they have a better job, they have a free life if single, so they will hesitate to decide when to jump into marriage and have a much more difficult life.”
The government has been preoccupied with falling birth rates for decades and from the mid-90s found a solution in “migrant brides” from China or Southeast Asian nations including Indonesia and Malaysia, encouraging them to marry local men and start families.
The concept helped maintain the population for about 20 years but has tailed off as the economic situation of prospective brides improved in their home countries.
Ms Lin said the focus on resolving the problems of a dwindling population needed to shift away from pushing people to have more children to harnessing digital solutions to plug labour shortages and to changing mindsets towards retirement and asking older, healthy people to keep working.
“We force and ask the younger generations to do the jobs and have the children to support the country. At the same time, we have another population, the elderly, and we say we will give you welfare, we will support you, but they could still keep their jobs and take care of themselves,” she said.
Encouraging women to have children without being married could also have a positive impact, she suggested, but to do so would run against widely held conservative values that still stigmatise single mothers.
“I always try to encourage [the view] that marriage is marriage, childbirth is another issue, it’s different. You could combine together or choose at a different stage. In Taiwan most choose to have marriage then children,” she said.
However, while government subsidies are available for in vitro fertilisation (IVF) procedures for lower income couples, the treatment is currently not legally available to prospective single parents. Single women are allowed to freeze their eggs, unlike in neighbouring China or in Singapore.
Liu Yuwen, a scriptwriter and art dealer who became a single mother at 36, said attitudes were becoming friendlier in Taiwan, especially with high profile success stories like Eileen Gu, the Chinese American Olympic skier, who was raised in a single parent household.
Ms Gu, who has made headlines as a gold medal winner and model who has already earned a place at Stanford University, was helping to change societal views on conventional families, said Ms Liu.
“It is very boring to discuss where her father is because her mother proved that you can raise a perfect child even if you are single,” she said.
Ms Liu said she had never wanted a husband, and her parents had accepted “marriage is not the only solution.” She added: “My friends don’t judge me, and some even told me they envy me.”
But she said regardless of status, Taiwanese parents felt enormous pressure even before the birth of their children over fierce competition for good schools and the cost of raising them.
Bei Li, a 43-year-old publisher and social media influencer, who writes on lifestyle issues, said soaring house prices were a major factor deterring young couples from having children. Since the 1990s, house prices have shot up while wages have stagnated.
A December report in the Taipei Times said house-price-to-income ratios were 9.07 nationally and 15.79 in the capital, Taipei, compared to 4.86 and 8.03 respectively 30 years ago.
And while eight weeks of maternity leave are guaranteed by law, the working culture was so intense that young mothers were sometimes afraid to take time off, said Ms Li.
“People in Taiwan don’t really dare to take this because colleagues can pressure you. The Taiwanese attitude, like the Japanese and Koreans, is just work, work, work,” she said.
“Being kinder and more flexible to parents doesn’t mean those parents will lower their working performance but only to give them some time to spend with their kids.”
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