Title PART 53.pdf ✅

28 The Economist July 8th 2023 Asia The new East Asian family A partial revolution X u Zaozao of Guangzhou was 30 years old when she broke up with her then- boyfriend in 2018. Though she felt social pressure to settle down and start a family, she did not want to put her career on hold. “In the background there’s a lot of the past era’s family values,” she says. She hoped to preserve her ability to have children later by freezing her eggs. But doctors at the Beijing hospital she vis- ited refused, as Chinese law allows only married couples to do so. Instead they urged her to marry and get pregnant earli- er. She sued the hospital in 2019. A court initially ruled against her, but Ms Xu (pic- tured on the next page) has appealed. “Should we neglect a whole generation of single women’s demands just because we can’t update this policy?” she asks. Her case and others involving fertility rights have galvanised support on social media from women in their late 20s or 30s. Ms Xu’s experience is illustrative of trends evident throughout East Asia. For her parents’ generation, households in China, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan largely consisted of mono­ethnic married couples with children, where men worked and women kept the home, an arrange- ment with its underpinnings in widely shared Confucian values. Such traditional arrangements remain extremely common. Yet across the region families are becom- ing far more varied. As young people delay or eschew marriage and having children, nuclear families are in decline. In Japan, where this process began earliest, couples with at least one child accounted for 42% of households in 1980, while single­person households made up just 20%. By 2020, couples with children had fallen to 25% of households, and single people represented 38%. In East Asia today, “the diversification of household structures is the story,” says Paul Chang of Harvard University. Yet in much of East Asia, laws and social mores around marriage and family are lag- ging behind the new reality. Governments have responded mostly by offering finan- cial incentives to marry and have children, in the hope of reviving the traditional fam- ily, rather than removing the obstacles that make it so hard to raise children in other settings. Many people are already trying to do so, as four path­breaking families pro- filed for this article demonstrate. Family life has big implications for the region’s demographic profile, and in turn, for its economic power. Ultra­low birth rates and stiff resistance to immigration produce shrinking populations: according to the United Nations, the four East Asian territories will see their combined popula- tions shrink by 28% between 2020 and 2075. During the same period, their com- bined share of global gdp is projected to drop from 26.7% to 17.4%, according to Goldman Sachs, a bank. No wonder, then, that political leaders see families as an urgent policy priority. Xi Jinping, China’s leader, has promised to boost birth rates and to promote “new­era marriage culture”. Kishida Fumio, Japan’s CHIBA , GUANGZHOU, SEOUL AND TAOYUAN The traditional family is fading. Alternative arrangements are fitfully emerging → Also in this section 30 India’s internet shutdowns 31 Banyan: Sri Lanka unreconciled 012

30 Asia The Economist July 8th 2023 bers (pictured below) live and work togeth- er. The enterprise consists of a school that teaches women language, writing and fi­ nancial management; a property business that rents out space for women; a talent- management company for female artists; and a women’s shelter. Guerrilla has grown into an experimental family of seven, in- cluding Ms Lee’s partner, their adopted daughter (who is just two years younger than Ms Lee), another couple, a friend and a dog. “I wanted to show the world that you don’t have to be blood­related, but you can become a family just with intellectual con- nections,” Ms Lee says. Policymakers want today’s youth to marry and procreate more. But their ideas for encouraging this consist mostly of eco- nomic incentives, such as subsidies and benefits for marriage and child­bearing. At the same time, many (almost all male) leaders are reinforcing traditionalism. Mr Xi has promoted a revival of Confucian- ism, which upholds traditional gender roles. The Communist Party has also cen- sored feminist and lgbt groups and arrest- ed some of their most prominent activists. Local party officials have given lectures on filial piety and the importance of family. Under Mr Yoon’s progressive predeces- sor, Moon Jae­in, South Korea’s Ministry of Gender Equality and Family extended its definition of a “family” eligible to receive social benefits beyond married heterosex- ual couples to unmarried couples, single parents and same­sex couples. Mr Yoon has walked those steps back and vowed to abolish the ministry. He blames feminism for the country’s low birth rate. Japanese family law is similarly outdat- ed. Married couples cannot keep separate surnames, a practice the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (ldp) has refused to change. (Women are the ones who change their names in 95% of cases.) Though many municipalities have pushed ahead and offered symbolic “partnership” certifi­ cates for same­sex couples, the national government has balked at legalising gay marriage. The ldp instead passed a bill last month that offers gay people toothless pro- tection against “unfair discrimination”, with no mention of marriage rights. This will offer little succour to couples like Igarashi Hayato and Kanno Takafumi of Chiba, near Tokyo. The two men have long wanted children, but Japanese law has made it difficult, as gay couples are often barred from adopting, or using donor eggs or sperm. Mr Igarashi and Mr Kanno (pic- tured on previous page) came up with a highly unusual solution. They agreed to have two children together with a lesbian couple, with the women raising the first and the men the second. In order to ensure their family is recognised as a legal unit, Mr Igarashi will adopt the child as a single father, and also adopt Mr Kanno as a sec- ond son. “I guess politicians think there’s only one form of family,” Mr Igarashi la- ments. “They can’t imagine an alterna- tive—they can’t imagine people like us ex- ist and live in Japan.” In many ways, public opinion has ad- vanced further than political leaders. Polls show a majority of Japanese, including most ldp voters, support both legalising gay marriage and allowing couples to have separate surnames. And although China’s central authorities are promoting a return to traditional gender roles, younger Chi- nese are increasingly open to wider roles for the genders and vocal about the impor- tance of gender equality. Recent incidents involving mistreatment of women in Chi- na have caused widespread public anger. They include the case of a trafficked bride found chained by the neck in a rural man’s shed last year, and an incident caught on video of men beating women who refused their advances at a restaurant. Clinging to rigid family structures will intensify the demographic crunch, while constraining people’s ability to lead free and happy lives. Wiser policies would seek to reflect the actual changing reality of East Asian families. “We need more flexible types of arrangements,” says Shirahase Sa- wako of the University of Tokyo. “If you rig- idly design structures they degrade.” In particular, new structures must tackle the growing tension between well­educated, empowered women and the patriarchal so- cial mores that still shape both private and public life in East Asia. Until that happens, women will continue pushing against the traditional roles of wife and mother. At best, they will thereby redefine what a fam- ily looks like. Too often, they will abandon the idea of family altogether. n Min­gyeong and her fellow insurgents Internet blackouts Blocked and reported! O N July 1st Elon Musk caused a stir by limiting the number of tweets visible to Twitter users in a single day. Perhaps he was inspired by the High Court of Karnata- ka, a big south­Indian state, which the day before had issued its own argument for re- stricting tweets. On June 30th the court ruled against Twitter in a case challenging the constitutionality of an Indian govern- ment demand, in 2022, to block content and several accounts critical of it. The court fined Twitter 5m rupees ($61,000) for failing to comply with that demand. Twitter is just one bit of the internet In- dia’s leaders wish to subdue. For the past five years India has led the world in inter- net shutdowns, according to Access Now, a New York­based advocacy group. Last year the second­highest number of internet disruptions, 22, was recorded in Ukraine, many of them related to the war there. In India, there were 84. The majority of India’s internet shut- downs are imposed in restive areas such as Jammu & Kashmir, which accounted for more than half of last year’s stoppages. The small north­eastern state of Manipur, which has been riven with ethnic violence since early May, is entering its third straight month of internet blackout. The state government, run by the Bharatiya Ja- nata Party (BJP), which also controls India’s central government, says the shutdown is necessary for “preventing any disturbanc- MUMBAI India, an aspiring digital superpower, keeps shutting down the internet 012