BEIJING — In early May, a hospital in Nanjing, a city in eastern China, was shut down by the authorities. The reason? It had been providing sperm bank services to single women. While governments around the world, including China, are trying to find ways to boost birth rates, Chinese law still bars single women from accessing sperm banks. Why? The answer lies in a deeply entrenched system of patriarchal values.
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To grasp how absurd this law is, just look at China’s shrinking population. In 2023, the country had two million fewer people than the year before, which was already on a downward trend. That decline continued in 2024, with another 1.39 million drop, leaving a total population of around 1.408 billion. The fertility rate stood at 1.07 children per woman in 2023 and dropped again to 1.013 in 2024 — well below the 2.1 needed to maintain a stable population.
Projections show the decline is far from over. If current trends hold, China’s population could fall to 525 million by 2100. This would pose massive challenges to the country’s economy, workforce, and social safety nets.
Support for heterosexual families only
In recent years, the government has rolled out a broad mix of measures to reverse this demographic slide. All family planning restrictions were lifted in 2021. The State Council introduced a package of support aimed at encouraging childbirth. On a local level, families are offered property vouchers or monthly childcare subsidies. There are also policies extending maternity protections and, to a lesser extent, allowing paternity leave. Investments are going into kindergartens, free in-vitro fertilization for married couples, and more.
But a closer look reveals that most of these efforts are aimed squarely at heterosexual couples, with a clear intention of reinforcing traditional patriarchal gender roles.
The state openly promotes marriage and childbearing
— but only within heterosexual relationships.
Parental leave is a clear example. In many regions, maternity leave has been extended to 158 days or more, while paternity leave is capped at just 15 days. Given the current economic downturn, many employers will think twice before hiring women, further deepening gender inequality in the labor market.
The state openly promotes marriage and childbearing — but only within heterosexual relationships. Schools and universities now run courses on love and relationships designed to foster student romance and drive up marriage and birth rates.
Politics always ends up defending men’s interests
The process of getting married has been dramatically simplified. In some places, it takes just a minute: a man and a woman show up at the office with their IDs and leave legally married, like something out of Las Vegas.
Meanwhile, getting a divorce has been made harder under the banner of “stabilizing families.” This leaves many people stuck in marriages they no longer want. Even women suffering domestic abuse face huge hurdles to escape. Reports of women being seriously injured or even killed by their husbands during drawn-out divorce proceedings are on the rise.
All of this makes it clear that the government’s aim isn’t just to boost the birth rate — it’s also to reinforce the traditional, patriarchal model of the family. In some ways, the latter goal seems even more important. Again and again, the system shows that it is more interested in defending men’s interests than women’s.
Many women want families, just without men
In 2023, China’s Supreme People’s Court passed a new law titled “Advancing New Trends in Society and Civilization,” aimed at reforming the traditional bride price system, where property or money is transferred from the groom’s family to the bride’s. Under the law, if the marriage doesn’t last or isn’t consummated, the husband can demand the bride price be returned.
But if the couple has children, the woman is not required to return the full amount. The law is designed to protect men from women supposedly only interested in money, while still recognizing the sacrifices women make in bearing and raising children. But there’s no law that protects women’s dowries — the assets they bring into marriage — because, as lawmakers claim, “there are too few cases where dowry returns are demanded.”
This might help explain why there are no official statistics on femicide,
either within or outside marriage.
Pressuring or manipulating women into marriage and then forcing them to have children is clearly in the interest of the state. Women who have children outside marriage are unwelcome. This might help explain why there are no official statistics on femicide, either within or outside marriage. Even so, an increasing number of Chinese women are aware of the risks — both financial and physical — posed by marriage, thanks to horrifying stories shared widely on social media.
That’s why more and more are choosing to have children on their own. But they soon run into the wall of China’s patriarchal structure: sperm banks can only serve married women whose husbands have fertility problems. According to Zhang Xinzong, director of the Guangdong Sperm Bank, this policy reflects “existing family values in our country and the difficulties single parents face.”
The rich turn to foreign sperm banks
Chinese women determined to raise children on their own have found ways to sidestep the law. Wealthier women travel abroad for sperm donations. Those with fewer resources — or who prefer to avoid international travel — resort to dating, using it solely as a means to conceive.
“Get rid of the father, keep the child” has become a popular saying on Chinese social media. More and more female bloggers and influencers are proudly embracing single motherhood. Many of them are wealthy businesswomen or members of the growing middle class, and they have large followings. At the same time, they attract waves of hatred from men.
This slogan has now made its way into China’s economically elite and more intellectually open coastal cities. There, successful daughters are often expected to inherit and run family businesses. In such cases, allowing a male outsider into the core of the family is seen as too great a risk.
A male-dominated space called “family”
Just 20 years ago, business owners were more likely to bring their sons-in-law into the family business than their daughters. Many of them were later pushed aside, manipulated, or even kicked out by those very sons-in-law. In extreme cases, daughters lost their inheritance or, in particularly abusive relationships, even their lives. Today, daughters who inherit family businesses are increasingly being understood when they choose to raise children without a man.
But for most young women in China, that choice is still out of reach. The job market is fiercely competitive. Gender discrimination remains widespread. Social and familial support is often lacking. Being a single mother remains heavily stigmatized outside elite circles. And the economic pressure is intense. Like everywhere in a patriarchal world, single motherhood is simply not a viable option for most.
The restrictive sperm bank policy is just one part of a much larger problem. At its core, the issue is not about having children, but about keeping women confined within the male-dominated space we call the family. As in other countries, when times get tough economically, women’s job prospects are the first to suffer. That only makes it harder for young women to break out of this trap.
