Chinese women it ‘doesn’t make sense’ to have babies After three Lunar New Year holidays in a row disrupted by China’s zero-COVID policy, Ann Pei, Mona Zhao, and Wenyi Hai were thrilled to be able to leave Shanghai and return to their families for this year’s festive season.To get more news about woman in ancient china, you can visit shine news official website. I knew that my mum and my grandparents would want to have a talk with me about marriage and children, especially since I’m in my thirties, and I wasn’t looking forward to that,” 31-year-old Ann Pei told Al Jazeera as she was preparing to head home to family near the city of Changchun in northeastern China. Wenyi Hai, who is 24, knew that a similar conversation was waiting for her when she reached her family in Ji’an in central China. “Normally, I can just excuse myself and hang up the phone when my parents start going on about husbands and babies, but when I am in their house, it’s not that easy to get away from the topic.” Parents and older relatives are notorious for asking probing personal questions of young adults during Lunar New Year, especially of young women who are unmarried.Mona Zhao told her parents that she would only visit them in Qingdao in eastern China for the holidays if they agreed not to mention marriage and children. “We have talked about that stuff a million times and I am sick of the discussion,” the 25-year-old explained.In January, China’s National Bureau of Statistics reported the population dropped by 850,000 people in 2022 – the first decline since the last year of the Great Famine in 1961. The fall comes in the wake of a birth rate that has been steadily declining since the implementation of the one-child policy in 1980. It has continued to fall even though the policy was abolished in 2015, suggesting that 2022’s population drop was not an exception but the start of a trend. The issue is set to be one of the key areas of discussion at the annual meeting of China’s parliament, which begins at the weekend. The problem for policymakers is that while women like Zhao, Pei and Hai are open to having a family one day, they are wary of marriage and motherhood because of the burdens and disadvantages it places on so many Chinese women.I don’t want my life to only be about taking care of kids, doing housework and taking care of my husband’s parents when they get old, but I feel like many families expect that from a married woman in China,” Hai said over a video connection. Studies do indeed show that Chinese women carry the weight of most domestic tasks — spending about twice as much time on housework as their husbands, for instance. “Also, it’s usually not enough with your husband’s salary in a family so you need to take care of a job on top of the duties at home,” Hai added, shaking her head in disbelief. At the same time, the 24-year-old does not want a job that simply fits around the task of bringing up a child. She says she wants a career she can be proud of. “I have a promotion coming up, and I would be risking it if I start making family plans now,” she explained.Even though it is illegal under Chinese law, some Chinese companies continue to make their female employees sign contracts that give the company the right to terminate them if they become pregnant. In 2019, Fan Huiling from Guangdong Province was fired from her job when she notified her employer that she was pregnant. The same happened to a woman in Jilin Province the previous year. Women able to reconcile pregnancy with their work life have discovered time off to have a baby can also come with great risks to their careers. Chinese women have reported being sidelined, demoted or replaced by their employers on returning to work from maternity leave. Women do not even need to be pregnant to encounter discrimination. Sometimes simply being of childbearing age can be a problem, regardless of whether a woman is planning to start a family or not.