While China’s population has declined for three consecutive years—with 2025 likely marking the fourth—one small city has managed to buck the national trend. Tianmen, in central Hubei Province, recorded about 7,217 births in 2024, a 17 percent increase from the previous year. The unusual surge has led Chinese state media to champion what they call the “Tianmen Model,” even drawing a Le Monde correspondent to the city to uncover its “fertility code.”
China now faces a steep demographic challenge. The average Chinese woman has just one child, placing the nation in the United Nations’ “ultra-low fertility” category. As Le Monde observed, the roots of this crisis lie in Beijing’s decades-long one-child policy, enforced from 1980 to 2015. Although authorities scrapped the restriction a decade ago and allowed up to three children per couple in 2021, the government has yet to acknowledge the lasting damage caused by its earlier policies.
Today, the picture has flipped completely. Where families were once punished with heavy fines for exceeding birth limits, local governments now offer tax breaks, housing support, and cash subsidies. Health workers who once enforced abortions now go door-to-door encouraging couples to have babies. Across China, cities compete to boost fertility rates, with local officials’ performance reviews now including birth statistics.
Leading this charge is Tianmen Party Secretary Ji Daoqing, who calls his city’s generous incentives a “capital investment.” The city provides newlyweds with housing subsidies worth about €7,200, monthly stipends of €100 for second children until age three, and €120 per month for third children. One mother told reporters she registered her newborn in Tianmen—despite living 700 kilometers away in Suzhou—just to qualify for the benefits. A local teacher added that having more children has even become tied to job prospects, with school principals reminding staff to “plan for a second child.”
The irony is striking. One woman recalled how her mother-in-law was forced to undergo an eight-month abortion decades ago to prevent her husband from losing his civil service job. Another grandmother remembered family planning officials in the 1990s taking her young son away for a week until she could return from her textile factory job in Guangzhou to prove she wasn’t pregnant again.
As one mother in Tianmen put it, “The policy has changed.” Once infamous for harsh enforcement of the one-child rule, Tianmen has now become a symbol of China’s desperate push to reverse its demographic decline.
Source: Radio France International, November 1, 2025
https://rfi.my/C96R