Q: Professor Zhou, can you tell us a bit about yourself?

I am trained as a social demographer and family sociologist, which means that I study issues related to family, gender, and population dynamics. Most of my work focuses on China and East Asia.

Yun Zhou — I ended up spending my entire sophomore year (2008-2009) in Islamabad, Pakistan studying Urdu. The study abroad experience certainly sparked my interests in gender, family, and population.

I received my Ph.D. in Sociology from Harvard University in 2017. Before coming to Michigan, I completed my postdoctoral training in Population Studies at Brown University.

Q: Why did you pick Urdu as an undergraduate study?

I kind of fell into Urdu Literature in undergraduate, but it turned out to be a fulfilling experience, and I ended up spending my entire sophomore year (2008-2009) in Islamabad, Pakistan studying Urdu. The study abroad experience certainly sparked my interests in gender, family, and population.

I arrived in Islamabad in the summer of 2008, which was less than a year after Benazir Bhutto was assassinated. On the ground, different popular sentiments were boiling. As a 19-year old, I was not as well-versed in geopolitics at the time. So to me, upon arrival, it was striking to see a country having been led by a female leader. Of course, Bhutto came from a political dynasty, so there are more complexities to the “women in power” picture. Nevertheless, I was intrigued by her then.

I lived on campus and had a lot of Pakistani female friends. Over time, I got to know them--their upbringings; their views on gender, marriage, and religion; the family expectations they faced; their visions of a woman's place in the world. There was a woman in my dorm, Mariam, who buried herself in her studies all the time. Most of us in the women’s dorm were constantly visiting each other and spending entire afternoons and evenings together, just talking. Mariam never visited anybody, and her door was always closed. Later, when most people had gone home for Eid and there were very few of us left in the dorm, she told me that she didn’t allow herself to socialize because she was always afraid of not studying enough. Mariam said that in winters she would wet her sleeves with cold water to keep herself awake and alert while studying. To this day, I still remember what Mariam said: "I have to do well and pass my exams. If I don't pass, I will have to go home and get married."

Of course, I don’t mean to paint Pakistan with any broad brushstrokes. But I do remember hearing my friends telling me about their lives, and then one day, serendipitously, I found a very dusty copy of the Norton Anthology of Literature by Women in the corner of the school’s small library, on the lowest shelf. I spent my entire year in Islamabad reading and re-reading the words of Emily Dickinson, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Adrienne Rich, Virginia Woolf, among others, and thinking how much those women's voices, desires, and hopes echoed with mine and my friends’. In my year in Islamabad, I met a lot of women with whom we shared aspirations, ambitions, and dreams of leaving our marks and claiming our space in places that have traditionally excluded people like us. My experience in Islamabad led me to double major in Sociology later in college. And the rest is history.

Q: Let’s talk about your research. Why did China shift from a one-child to a three-child policy?

When China implemented the one-child policy in 1980, the country’s total fertility rate had already been declining dramatically throughout the 1970s. The consensus among scholars is that the one-child policy was part and parcel of China’s efforts in achieving development goals after the Cultural Revolution. After a tumultuous decade, the party-state was eager to reclaim and reestablish its political legitimacy, and viewed spurring economic development as central to accomplish this. Based on pseudo-scientific demographic projections, limiting birth to one child per married heterosexual couple was thought as the way to achieve a population size perceived most optimal for China’s economic development.

The universal two-child policy in 2016 and the most recent three-child policy are designed to combat issues related to persistent low fertility, such as rapid population aging, rising need for pension support, shrinking labor pool and diminishing demographic dividend. Crucially, these relaxations are not about expanding reproductive rights. Again, the new policies’ primary objective is to manage the population for achieving the state’s desired economic and development goals.

In these policies, birth is limited to heterosexual married couples. Unmarried women who want to have children still face many hurdles in obtaining maternal benefits. Reproductive rights for LGBTQ people are invisible altogether.

Q: Are there any changes in Chinese preference for sons?

There are some changes, but there are remarkable consistencies. According to the most recent 2020 census data, the sex ratio at birth (SRB) remains imbalanced and above its natural level of about 105 male live births per 100 female live births. The official report of the 2020 census puts China’s SRB at 111.3 in 2020.

One of my working papers looks at highly educated urban Chinese women’s sex preference attitude for offspring. I found that son preference persists in this group, and paradoxically among women who otherwise support gender equality. However, their reasonings are quite nuanced. Some women want sons so that their children can be spared from the gender discrimination that they themselves are facing. They also view raising daughters in a gender-discriminatory society as emotionally taxing work. Of course, this raises an interesting question: Despite the nuanced reasoning for son preference, to what extent will such reasonings and preference challenge the existing patriarchal order?

Q: Why is a baby boom not going to happen in China?

My research mainly focuses on highly educated urban individuals. For this group, they frequently highlight the tremendous financial and time constraints as obstacles that keep them from having more than one child. Women also view having a successful career as fundamentally incompatible with having multiple children. These women often want a life that is not limited to the private sphere. The one-child policy has an impact on people’s fertility desires as well. For those who have grown up as singleton children and have peers that are overwhelmingly singleton children, the one-child policy also shaped their imagination of what an ideal family looks like.

Q: The low fertility rate is not a problem unique to China. What would you recommend the Chinese government to do?

When I teach about fertility in my courses, I always ask my students: Why is low fertility a problem? And if it is a problem, it is a problem for whom? Is low fertility a problem because it poses issues for the state? Is low fertility necessarily a problem for individuals if individuals are actively opting out of having children? When is low fertility a problem for individuals too? It is always important for us to be mindful of these questions as we problematize fertility or frame low fertility as a problem—or not.

These new policies—universal two-child and three-child—have come from the old playbook of managing population and women’s reproduction for economic goals and political objectives. I always say that population policy has to be about human rights—particularly women’s (and birthing parents’) rights.

Q: Tell us something that most people don't know about you?

I'm a huge fan of science fiction. I am currently reading The City We Became by N.K. Jemisin.

Q&A with Yun Zhou