The reproductive climate concerns of young, educated Chinese: ‘when the nest is upset, no egg is left intact’

Abstract

ABSTRACT An emerging area of research concerns the phenomenon of young people factoring climate change into their reproductive plans and choices, but existing scholarship and popular discourse have focused exclusively on Western and developed countries. This paper examines whether young people in China are also connecting their reproductive plans and choices to climate change, and why. Based on the quantitative and qualitative results from an exploratory survey of 173 young, educated, climate-alarmed or climate-concerned Chinese, we found that reproductive climate concerns are reported by many young Chinese. Respondents expressed deep and multi-layered concerns about the wellbeing of their (potential) children in a climate-changed future, though they did not rank climate change highly among other factors that might influence their reproductive choices. Climate-alarmed Chinese reported lower levels of reproductive climate concerns and more positive visions of the future than a similar group of US-Americans. We attribute these findings to China’s history of family planning, state-constructed climate discourse, stage of development, and hierarchical cultural worldview. As the first study on reproductive climate concerns in Asia, this research addresses a major gap in our knowledge, with implications for the sociology of climate change, the sociology of reproduction, environmental psychology, Asian studies, and demography.