(Not) Becoming Mothers: Fertility Intentions and Reproductive Agency During the Three-child Policy in China

This paper examines Chinese women’s fertility intentions and attitudes toward motherhood following the implementation of the three-child policy announced in May 2021. Drawing on Minello’s theoretical framework for analyzing declining fertility, I argue that the reproductive choices of Chinese women are not influenced by the possibility of having additional children, but rather by the disjuncture between the structural and cultural dimensions of contemporary Chinese society. Market liberalization and the privatization of welfare services following the economic reforms of the 1980s created a disjuncture between the material needs of Chinese families and the traditional cultural assumptions regarding family and maternity, which was exacerbated by the introduction of the one-child policy and subsequently of the two-child policy. Against this background, the implementation of the three-child policy continues to stimulate forms of awareness and reflection concerning women’s bodily autonomy, reproductive agency, and fertility intentions. Employing social media posts as case studies, this paper aims not only to underscore how birth rates are increasingly affected by economic and political structures, but also to stimulate reflection on material concerns and forms of dissent that, despite their cultural specificity, can serve as a bridge toward broader, non-Eurocentric feminist analyses of motherhood.