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Comment by ghomrassen | Hacker News Reader

One child policy was in effect and Chinese people got used to it. It's been enforced as a social norm and the subsequent generations seldom have more than two kids. You can add China's increased urbanisation, increased work hours and smaller houses/apartments into the mix.

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Are the work hours very different between working extremely long hours in a factory and working extremely long hours on a farm 70 years ago?

One Child Policy was certainly a huge factor. So is probably a strong rise in wealth and education, which are both linked to lower birth rates.

Farmers sustain their families where they work. Factory workers are separated from their families. China is full of villages with only grand-parents and small children left.

Absolutely. More children meant more farmhands. In the city, it's a net negative.

It's not to say you're wrong, it's just the one child policy is a compounding factor.

True, there's less incentive to have large families, and it's a practical issue as well, I suppose. You can have your child around and keep an eye on them while you're working on the family farm, but you can't take them with you into a factory and sit them down next to the assembly line.

Are there plans to do the opposite of OCP? I suppose it's easy-ish to forbid people to have multiple children, but to force them because you now need them?

Forcing can be in terms of incentives like tax rebates etc.

It might be that the incentives offered in Western European countries aren't large enough, but it seems counter-intuitive - we had much larger families when the incentives were much smaller. The long established population has very few children, recent immigrants (from poorer countries) have more, but also show falling birth rates within a few generations. And that's in countries with free education, usually free healthcare for children, tax rebates, financial support from the government et cetera.

A lot of families are split up as a result of migrant factory work and the factory dorms, so it's probably a drag in multiple ways compared to farming.

Good point. It's hard to have children when you're physically apart for most of the year, and it's even harder to raise them when you're not home. Do children generally stay with family in the rural areas, or do they stay with one or both parents in the industrial zones?

China went from forced to proper demographic transition.

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