Monday, September 8, 2025 | 11:00 AM EDT
Since 2022, China’s population has been in decline, signaling a demographic shift with profound and far-reaching consequences. The impact is compounded by a rapidly aging population. In response, the Chinese government has pivoted towards pro-natalist policies. Local governments have rolled out various initiatives to encourage families to have more children, including housing subsidies, cash incentives, and expanded maternity and childcare leave. In July 2025, the central government announced it will offer families a three-year annual cash allowance for each child born after January 1, 2025. Whether China’s new pro-natalist policies will succeed in reversing its demographic decline remains uncertain, but the issue is critical, both for China’s future and for the global economy.
In a panel discussion conducted on September 8, 2025, Susan Greenhalgh and Xuan Li, in conversation with Carl Minzner, examine China’s evolving family policy landscape and the implications of new policies and incentives for China’s people and economy.
Speakers
Susan Greenhalgh
Susan Greenhalgh is the John King and Wilma Cannon Fairbank Professor of Chinese Society emerita at Harvard University. Her interests lie in the entanglements of state, market, science, and society, and their consequences for human well-being and social justice. She is best known for her work on the politics of the one-child policy, discussed in Just One Child: Science and Policy in Deng’s China (2008), Governing China’s Population: From Leninist to Neoliberal Biopolitics (with E. A. Winckler) (2005), and Cultivating Global Citizens: Population in the Rise of China (2010). She continues to follow shifts in China’s population policy. In the last few years, her research has focused on the corporate corruption of science, globally and in China. Soda Science: Making the World Safe for Coca-Cola (2024) examines the science behind China’s policies on chronic disease. Dr. Greenhalgh received her BA from Wellesley College and MA and Ph.D. from Columbia University.
Xuan Li
Xuan Li is an associate professor of psychology at the University of Copenhagen. Prior to joining the University of Copenhagen, she was assistant professor of psychology at New York University Shanghai, and research associate at the German Youth Institute (Deutsches Jugendinstitut) in Munich. She holds a Ph.D. and a MPhil in social and developmental psychology from the University of Cambridge, and undergraduate degrees in Germanistik and psychology from Peking University.
Dr. Li’s research focuses on fatherhood, parent-child interactions and relationships, and children and adolescents’ gender and socioemotional development in Chinese contexts. She is also interested in general issues pertaining to human development, family research, and gender studies. She has written several book chapters on family and parent-child relations in China, and her work has appeared in journals such as Developmental Psychology, Child Development, and Child Development Perspectives.
Moderator
Carl Minzner
Carl Minzner is an expert in Chinese law and governance. He has written extensively on these topics in both academic journals and popular press, including op-eds appearing in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, and Christian Science Monitor.
He is the author of End of an Era: How China’s Authoritarian Revival is Undermining its Rise (Oxford University Press, 2018), which analyzed how China’s reform era steadily drew to a close in the first decades of the 21st century, and explored the rising risks facing the nation as Beijing pivots towards a personalist authoritarian regime under Xi Jinping, and steadily reasserts tighter control over the state, economy, and society alike. He is currently working on a second book examining the challenges China will confront over the coming decades as the result of demographic change, such as rapid aging and declining numbers of youth, and Beijing’s emerging response.
