Key Points:
- North Korea's Kim Jong-un is the latest leader to encourage women to have more children.
- Populations in Russia, North Korea and China are steadily declining.
- Experts warn that encouraging people to have more children is not a solution to current population crises.
The solution to North Korea's social problems is motherhood, according to leader Kim Jong-un.
He was recently shown by state media in apparent tears while begging North Korean mothers to have more children, which he said would strengthen the nation's power.
Last month Russian President Vladimir Putin asked women in his country to have eight or more children and make bigger families the norm.
At this year's national women's congress meeting in China in November, the country's President Xi Jinping made notable shifts in his usual and seemed to imply he thinks women should stay home and bear children, the Economist reported.
Experts have noted each of these three countries has declining populations, though not for the same reasons.
Why are populations falling across North Korea, Russia and China?
According to South Korea’s government statistics agency, North Korea’s total fertility rate has declined to 1.79 in 2022, down from 1.88 in 2014.
The fertility rate refers to the average number of children a woman will give birth to. Countries need a fertility rate of 2.1 to keep populations stable without migration.
"North Korea's birth rate has been falling continuously since 1970," Dr Leonid Petrov, visiting fellow at the Australian National University's College of Asia and the Pacific, told SBS News.
In the 1970s and 80s, North Korea implemented birth control measures to slow post-war population growth and a famine in the 1990s also caused the population to decline. The Seoul-based Hyundai Research Institute said in a report in August that North Korea's population was expected to shrink from 25 million to 23.7 million by 2070 with its current birth rate.
North Korea has technically been at war with South Korea since 1953. According to the CIA World Factbook, compulsory military service starts at 17 for both sexes and can last for up to 13 years for men and up to seven years for women.
North Korean leader Kim Jong-un said it was the duty of women to stop a fall in the country’s births to strengthen national power, state media said. Source: AAP / Cha Song Ho/AP
Russia's conflicts and exoduses
Since 1994, when the Russian population was about 148 million people, it has dropped by about five million, sitting at 143 million in 2021.
In the 1990s, during the break-up of the Soviet Union, Russia’s fertility rate was one of the lowest in the world.
Between 1989 and 1999, the total fertility rate in Russia declined from 2.01 to 1.16. The fertility rate in Russia is currently 1.5.
Because so few babies were born from 1989 to 1999, the knock-on effect is fewer children are being born now because there are not as many adults.
Russia has introduced financial incentives to encourage women to have more children, however, these have not helped improve the birth rate, analysts say.
In the ongoing war with Ukraine, , saying Moscow aimed to mobilise up to one million reservists.
There are no official statistics from Russia on the number of Russian soldiers that have been killed in Ukraine. However, the UK Ministry of Defence released an estimate on 4 December that, between the start of Russia's renewed invasion of Ukraine on 24 February last year and November this year, about 70,000 Russian soldiers had been killed and up to 280,000 wounded.
Dr Cai Wilkinson is an associate professor of international relations at Deakin University in Melbourne who has researched gender roles in Russia.
"The demographics are worrying [for the Russian government]" she told SBS News.
Wilkinson says that encouraging Russian women to have more children will do very little to help solve Russia’s current population woes.
"It’s an overly simplistic solution that’s impossible to achieve," she said. "It's ideological, not practical."
Russian President Vladimir Putin (left) and Chinese President Xi Jinping are both urging female citizens of their respective countries to have more children. Source: Anadolu / via Getty Images
China's one-child policy
Between 1980 and 2015 China had a one-child policy that subjected millions of women to forced contraception and sterilisation as well as forcing adoptions. In January this year, for the first time in 60 years.
The country's National Bureau of Statistics reported a drop of roughly 850,000 people for a population of 1.4 billion in 2022, marking the first decline since 1961, the last year of China's Great Famine.
Despite the one-child policy being , including financial incentives, many Chinese women are choosing to only have one child, for fear it could negatively affect their employment.
A 2020 study on the impact of family planning policy changes on urban women by the Women’s Studies Institute of China reported that 45 per cent of respondents said their employment was negatively affected by pregnancy or childbearing.
Additionally, many women are choosing to only have one child because of the cost of raising a child in urban China.
"I think the most important reason is economic. The living cost in China is high especially in the housing market, especially in major cities. For a young couple, it's very difficult to afford a house", Dr Xijian Peng, a senior research fellow at the Centre for Policy at Melbourne's Victoria University told SBS News.
Why are these leaders asking women to have more children now?
Population decline doesn’t happen overnight — it's a long and slow process.
"There are several functions to the drive to have children, part of it is the survival of the nation. They need to reproduce the Russian nation," Wilkinson said.
Wilkinson says that these reforms are part of wider gender politics: "It sends a message to women what’s expected of them."
The international community has imposed similar on Russia and North Korea and both economies have been affected.
In these situations, "The only way to improve both the military and labour output is just to have a growing fertility rate," Petrov said.
"Survival of [Kim Jong-un's] regime and the continuation of the Korean war will only happen with a bursting birth rate."
China isn't as concerned with the survival of the nation but rather its economy.
"Because of the low fertility rate and negative population growth China has a declining labour force, which will slow down China’s economic growth," Peng said.
"The declining labour force will result in increased labour costs and labour-intensive manufacturing out of China. The big domestic market is one of China’s reasons for vast economic growth."
