In East Asia, matrimony and childbearing have been seen for centuries as paramount life events of unquestionable moral significance and status for young adults. However, by 2018, three East Asian advanced economies (i.e. Hong Kong, Taiwan and South Korea) have all experienced period total fertility rates (TFR) below one child per woman, a level that is almost unprecedented in any Western low-fertility society.¹ While tempo effects play a crucial role in causing such low rates, cohort total fertility rates (CTFR) have also declined from at least two children for the early 1950s cohorts to 1.2–1.8 children for those born in 1970. Such dramatic changes have led to concerns being raised and some fingers being pointed in this region, which has long been characterised by patriarchy and misogyny. When very low fertility rates first hit this region after the 1990s, accusations that young people are selfish and materialistic began to emerge. It is not uncommon to hear politicians making comments about how young women are deviating from their traditional childbearing and homemaker roles and duties. Derogatory terms such as “leftover women” and “loser dogs” have also been coined to describe unmarried, childless women above age 30. Indeed, the city mayor of Taipei in Taiwan, Wen-Je Ko, once blamed women for posing national security concerns by not marrying and having children, and only changed his statement to include men after single women and feminist groups expressed irritation (Gerber 2015). Similar comments about a single Korean female professor nominated for a government position also sparked anger in 2019 (McCurry 2019). This kind of scapegoat narrative lies at the heart of the Confucian patriarchal culture that is shared across all East Asian societies (Gietel-Basten 2019).

Meanwhile, East Asia is also a region in which female empowerment through education and employment has progressed tremendously over the past few decades. It has, however, become clear that the relatively rigid patriarchal cultural and family systems of East Asia are maladapted to women’s rising status and economic independence. The traditional social order of male and elder dominance at home has become increasingly incompatible with women’s professional pursuits and their expectations of an ideal marriage. This mismatch inevitably lowers women’s motivations to get married and to bear children, as doing so tends to entail obligations that hinder women’s personal aspirations, and that confine them within the domestic realm under the traditional Confucian ideology of ideal wifehood and motherhood. In addition, traditional Confucian values place heavy emphasis on academic attainment, which has its roots in the civil service exam system in ancient China. These ingrained values are reflected in a shared strong valuation of academic pursuits, which translates into the prevailing credentialism found in the region. This increases the costs of raising children and heightens the quality-quantity anxiety among (would-be) parents.

While past research has provided explanations for why fertility rates declined to very low levels so rapidly in East Asia, most of these studies focused on social and structural changes. Very few studies have attempted to look at the overarching cultural ideology that has shaped the unique fertility patterns in East Asia. This paper will begin by offering an overview of the social and demographic profiles of five East Asian societies² that experienced precipitous transitions to very low fertility. We will then review the paths to ultra-low fertility levels and the unique features of these societies, followed by the commonly discussed causes that give rise to such phenomena. In particular, this study highlights the role of Confucian culture, which emphasises patriarchal values and credentialism, in shaping the current low rates of family formation in the region; and how it influences women’s roles at home, the effectiveness of pro-natalist policies and the burden of human capital investments among parents. With these contextual factors and current very low fertility rates as a backdrop, we also examine attitudinal changes in marriage and family values that have taken place in these societies after the new millennium. These changes could further erode the traditional family and influence family formation trends in the future. The article concludes by discussing recent policy responses and the possible future of fertility in East Asia.

Slightly more than one-fifth (roughly 1.6 billion) of the world’s population live in East Asia, and the region is home to some of the fastest growing economies of the past half century. However, the socio-historical backgrounds of these societies vary. China has been a socialist state since the mid-20th century and underwent economic reforms in the late 1970s. Hong Kong was a colony of the United Kingdom until 1997 and has remained a global financial centre since it was returned to China. While industrialisation started as early as in the late 19th century in Japan, it took off much later in Taiwan and South Korea (abbreviated as Korea hereafter), and did not affect their demographic development until the latter half of the 20th century. These socio-historical factors have created different trajectories of economic development and paces of fertility decline across these societies. For instance, the timing of the emergence of below-replacement fertility across the region ranges from the mid-1950s in Japan to the early 1990s in China. By the latter half of the 2000s, the countries of East Asia were experiencing some of the lowest fertility levels ever recorded in the world (i.e. the TFR reached a low of 0.9 in 2003 in Hong Kong and in 2010 in Taiwan).

The socio-economic and demographic profiles of East Asian societies differ markedly (Table 1). Hong Kong has the smallest population, but the highest income levels and human development score in the region. In contrast, compared to its neighbours, China has the largest population and a higher period total fertility rate (at least according to some sources), but lower income levels and a lower human development score. Taiwan and South Korea have more similar profiles in terms of income levels, period total fertility rates and human development indices, whereas Japan has higher income levels and period fertility rates than these two countries. The gap between the TFR and the cohort fertility rates (CTFR) observed at age 40 for women born in 1970 suggests that in Korea and Taiwan, there have been strong tempo effects as well as declines in fertility quantum due to increased rates of lifelong singlehood. In contrast, the tempo effect in China is less visible, and the narrow difference between the TFR and the CTFR in Hong Kong reflects a convergence of both period and cohort fertility to extreme low levels. In addition, the share of childless women in the 1970 cohort reveals how variations in the levels of completed fertility rates can be attributed to diverging rates of childlessness. The speed of increases in the percentages of childless women has been remarkable: from about 11% to 28% for the cohorts born between the early 1950s and 1970s in Japan; and from about 9% to 16% for those born in the early 1960s and 1970s in Taiwan. These contextual differences set the backdrop against which different trajectories of the fertility transition came into being in contemporary East Asia.

While the remarkable economic growth in the region since the 1970s is often cited as the cause of the rapid decline in fertility to very low levels, the deep-rooted Confucian culture in East Asia is another crucial factor. This cultural system is characterised by a hierarchical and patriarchal social order in which men have dominance over women, the elderly have higher status than the young, and rulers have more power than their subjects. Confucianism not only governs family life, it puts great emphasis on educational credentials earned through the state examination system. It also places a woman (wife) in a subordinate position relative to her husband. These hierarchies were historically facilitated by low levels of education and high levels of illiteracy, and by early marriage for women, which was common well into the 20th century. The remnants of these practices have hampered the progress of gender equality in recent decades. When placed within a collectivist family system, persistent gender inequalities make childbearing and childrearing a heavy burden for young couples in societies with rising living standards and increasingly competitive market economies.³

Based on the patterns and causes of East Asian fertility decline discussed above, we can argue that the very low fertility levels in the region are largely the result of both continuity and changes in traditional values. On the one hand, Confucian patriarchal values still strongly influence people’s decisions surrounding intimate relationships and family formation, such that non-marital birth rates and the prevalence of cohabitation have remained very low. The underlying mindset is characterised not only by an emphasis on women’s chastity, but on marriage as the ideal setting for childbearing and childrearing. On the other hand, in recent decades, attitudinal changes have been taking place across these societies to varying degrees and particularly in terms of people’s views on women’s roles, marriage, marital childbearing and old-age support. The analyses that follow will show that common public discourses asserting that young people have low fertility intentions because they are selfish and materialistic perpetuate myths, and do not accurately reflect young people’s values. In fact, many of these discourses are still based on Confucian moral codes, even though these teachings have become increasingly incompatible with the rapidly changing world young people are now facing.

Using data drawn from the 2006 and 2016 East Asian Social Survey⁵ (EASS), Table 2 shows the percentage of respondents of marriageable ages (i.e. aged 20–49) who agreed with eight statements about marriage and family values. The response values are on a seven-point scale, ranging from strongly disagree (=1) to strongly agree (=7), with neither agree nor disagree (=4) in the middle. Hence, the figures in Table 2 (percentage of respondents agreeing with a statement shown) refer to those who answered with values ranging from five to seven. The two survey years of 2006 and 2016 are the only two time points when the EASS family modules were administered.

Although the public opinions revealed in Table 2 reflect changes over one decade only, they offer comparable attitudinal measures for four East Asian countries with a Confucian heritage. We can see that, overall, family values were shifting towards more liberal attitudes, even though they fell short of catching up with the speed of women’s socio-economic progress. The figures show that attitudes towards gender roles (item 1), union formation (items 2–4) and childbearing (items 5–6) had become more non-traditional, even though the attitudinal changes in family obligations (items 7–8) were relatively minor. As fewer respondents endorsed the traditional breadwinner-housekeeper model, more respondents also considered cohabitation without a marriage plan an acceptable option. Moreover, married people were not rated as happier than singles. Levels of acceptance for childless marriage increased, while the preference for sons declined over time. The pace of change in views about cohabitation and childless marriage is particularly notable. Among the four East Asian countries studied, the South Koreans stand out as having the most traditional attitudes and adhering to more conventional family values, while also displaying the most rapid attitudinal changes on the first six of these eight items. These findings are in line with the results showing that the percentage of Korean men and women who were lifelong single also began to increase later and rose more slowly than it did the other three advanced East Asian economies in Figure 6; and that Korean women still shoulder 85% of total household chores, which is by far the highest level among the five societies analysed in Figure 10. In addition, both the unavailability of cohabitation statistics (Yoo 2015) and the very low non-marital birth rates (Raymo et al. 2015) in Korea point to the stigma and the undesirability of non-conventional family formation in that society. The highly traditional social milieu in Korea stands in stark contrast to the remarkable rise in the percentage of tertiary-educated Korean women aged 25–29, as shown in Figure 3. This is likely one of the key factors driving attitudinal changes and the reason why the TFR keeps declining in South Korea, reaching a record low of 0.92 children per woman in 2019, despite the government’s heavy investments in various pronatalist policies since the turn of the new millennium (Lee and Choi 2015). In short, when a society retains views on women’s roles that originated in a context in which women were less educated and had limited career prospects, younger cohorts of well-educated women will inevitably face more repercussions when they attempt to pursue non-traditional life goals. This certainly has implications for their family behaviours, because they might be considered less desirable potential marriage partners and mothers and have to shoulder much higher opportunity costs of childbearing.

Even though the fertility transition to below-replacement levels occurred later in East Asia than it did in most of the Western developed countries, the speed and the scope of these demographic changes have been greater in East Asia than they were in the West. While it took about 50 to 80 years for Western developed nations to reach the threshold of people aged 65 or older making up 20% of the population, Japan took only 33 years to reach this point, and it could take even fewer years for Taiwan and Korea to reach this threshold. Except in China, where marriage remains near-universal for women, the ultra-low fertility levels in East Asia were initially driven by declining marital fertility rates and delayed childbearing, and then by decreasing marriage rates in the absence of non-marital births. Along with the persistence of patriarchal culture, the high costs of raising children and the limited availability of public child care have led people in East Asia to have fewer children and to form fewer marital unions than in the past. The shares of women who were still single at age 50 have been rising since the 1990s in all advanced East Asian economies (and in Japan, since 1970s) (Figure 6). Thus, how fertility in this region develops in the future will be influenced by the evolution of matrimonial behaviour over time, and by whether attitudinal changes de-stigmatise non-marital childbearing.

It appears that one of the reasons why so many young people stay unmarried is that they feel they are neither able nor ready to have children. This could be because the direct costs of childrearing are too high, or simply because they want to stay away from a patriarchal marriage system that is too stressful and involves too much personal sacrifice. The high costs of raising children can be ameliorated by providing child care subsidies, inexpensive public child care, or even free education, and by implementing more comprehensive economic policies that help young workers escape the low-wage trap they are currently facing in East Asia. But changing the marriage system is hardly attainable by policies alone. Given that childbearing is considered an unquestionable moral duty in patrilineal East Asia, newlywed couples often get bombarded with inquiries about their childbearing plans by parents and family members from both sides. This can be stressful for men and women who are employed in competitive market economies, and particularly hard to bear for women in families in which there is a strong preference for sons. In the case of Taiwan, the sex ratios at birth are still 108–109 for parity 2 and 114 for parities 3 and above, even among the younger cohorts born in 1980–1989 (author’s calculations using birth register data in 1998–2016). Hence, when we look at why marriage rates have been declining in recent decades, it becomes clear that the social mentality and the prevailing norms about marriage and childbearing are incompatible with the empowerment and the rising agency of women. Young adults in East Asia should be given more flexibility to form families: i.e. partnership formation, marriage and childbearing should have no strictly defined timing or order; and these events should promote, rather than attenuate, their personal well-being.

In addition to suffering from norms of gender inequality and relatively rigid life choices, women face prevailing marital age preferences that often discriminate against them after they reach age 35. This is likely due to women’s declining fecundity over the life course (Wood 1994), since continuing the family bloodline is considered a crucial purpose of marriage in East Asia. In the case of Taiwan, the marriage life tables generated by the 2015 age-specific marriage rates (see Table 3) indicate that the probabilities of marrying at ages 30–34 among those individuals who were single at ages 25–29 were quite similar for men and women across educational groups, but also that the comparable probabilities of marrying at ages 35–39 were much higher for men than for women with tertiary education. These gender gaps in marriage further widen when people reach their early forties: at this point in the life course, about one-fifth of single men but fewer than 8% of single women with tertiary education can still expect to marry. With the expansion of tertiary education and the rising mean age at marriage in recent decades, this age prejudice can have considerable implications for future fertility levels in East Asia. First, shrinking cohort sizes and unbalanced sex ratios will create a substantial marriage squeeze to the disadvantage of men that will lead to fewer marriages and fewer childbirths, if non-marital births remain scarce. Second, with late motherhood stretching to above age 40 in many low-fertility societies (Beaujouan and Sobotka 2019), the low marriage rates among women beyond conventional marriageable ages in East Asia would make a potential fertility reversal much less likely in the future.

The prospects for fertility in East Asia can also be evaluated by using a recent forecast on levels of singlehood in East Asia. To gauge marriage patterns, Esteve et al. (2020) conducted a marriage forecast for four East Asian countries from 2010 up to 2050. They assumed that the prevailing marriage norms observed in 2010 will persist until 2050. The 2010 age- and educational-specific marriage propensities (Schoen 1988) were then applied to the projected population structure by age, sex, education and marital status up to 2050. The results indicated that lifelong singlehood among women aged 45–49 will likely reach 15% in Korea and Japan and nearly 30% in Taiwan; but a much lower level in China, which is expected to continue to have a universal marriage regime. Assuming that non-marital birth rates stay as low as they have been since 1970 in East Asia, married women will need to have about 2.1 children in Japan and 2.6 children in Taiwan for these countries to achieve a CTFR of 1.8 in 2050 — much less a level closer to replacement. Given that the marital fertility rate among the 1975 cohort in Taiwan is about 1.9 children (with a forecasted CTFR (1975) of 1.55, assuming 20% of women never marry), a substantial increase in either the marriage or the marital fertility rates will be required for a demographically sustainable fertility level to occur.

Cultural and institutional factors are at the root of the sustained ultra-low fertility levels in East Asia. As significant demographic changes took place in the region within a short period of three to four decades, a clash of values has inevitably occurred between the older and the younger generations. To be more specific, low fertility in East Asia has been accompanied by declining marriage rates and minimal non-marital births largely because Confucian family norms continue to influence the socially acceptable timing and sequence of family behaviours. These rigid norms hamper the emergence of new values and behaviours among young adults, who are facing an increasingly diverse set of options and trajectories in life. For example, while prolonged education can substantially affect the timing of people’s economic readiness for marriage, these societies show little tolerance for marriage in the absence of financial readiness, or for non-marital births. These norms have left the younger generations with few choices other than to postpone or forego marriage (and thus childbearing), which eventually results in societies having persistent low fertility and high levels of lifetime childlessness.

On the other hand, the collectivist culture that views child care as the responsibility of the family led to East Asian governments providing little support for families. However, these governments became more active in implementing pronatalist policies that promote work-family balance around the 1990s (for Japan) and 2000s. These new policies included the expansion of the provision of child care and parental leave policies (Suzuki 2012; Lee and Lin 2016). More policies were introduced after 2010, when the TFR remained stuck below 1.5 children. For instance, South Korea has invested more than 70 billion U.S. dollars in supporting childbearing since late 2000s (Poon 2018). But even though these Korean pronatalist policies provide some of the world’s most generous child care subsidies and paid parental leave (52 weeks), the TFR in Korea declined to a record low of 0.92 in 2019. In response to a shortage of high quality public child care for children under age six, the Taiwanese government launched a “quasi-public child care” program in six major municipalities in August 2018 that converted private facilities into more affordable “quasi-public” child care (Focus Taiwan 2019). That is, the government recruited private preschools and kindergartens and provided subsidies in exchange for monitoring their fees and operations, thereby making them more affordable to parents. In 2019, this program was further expanded to all 22 administrative regions in Taiwan, and an income tax cut for families with dependent children was enacted (Focus Taiwan 2019). Finally, in 2018, the Japanese government announced that it will make preschool education free from ages three to five beginning in October 2019 (The Japan Times 2019). In mid-September 2019, Prime Minister Abe indicated that Japan plans to cover educational and medical expenses for all children under age 16 starting in October 2019.

It is too early to assess the impact and the effectiveness of these recent new policies on fertility and marriage. Given that the fertility levels of married women range from two children in Taiwan to fewer than two children in Hong Kong, Japan, Korea and China, declining marriage rates and marital fertility are key issues faced by these societies. Whether these recent policies will make childbearing more affordable and, thus, marriage more feasible for young adults remains to be seen. The differences between the TFR and the CTFR discussed earlier (see Table 1) suggest that Taiwan, Korea and China have slightly more leeway than Japan and Hong Kong, as the cohort completed fertility levels at age 40 for those born in 1970 are 1.7–1.75 children for the former group, yet only 1.43 and 1.15 for the latter two countries. The critical issues now are helping married couples have the number of children they want and supporting unmarried adults in forming families. While the former aim could be tackled by the recently enacted family policies, the latter goal will be hard to achieve before gender relations reach a more ideal state of equilibrium.

While replacement migration is a potential policy option for low-fertility countries, East Asian societies have not been particularly keen on pursuing this route. Migration policies in this region are often born out of expediency, and are seldom designed to increase diversity or to expand the young adult population. Even though the numbers of labour and marriage migrants to these countries have increased in recent decades, the labour migrants often face rigid governmental controls that prohibit them from settling (Piper 2004), while marriage migrants do not have more children than native-born women (Ishikawa 2015; Kim 2018; Yang et al. 2012). Thus, it appears that expanding immigration is not a policy choice that is likely to be adopted in low-fertility East Asia.

In short, in East Asia, population decline due to very low fertility levels is likely an inevitability. The causes of this phenomenon are not just insufficient policy support for families, but cultural and institutional factors that hamper family formation. While it takes time for more profound social transformation to happen, family forms have nonetheless diversified in East Asia as divorce rates have increased and cross-border marriages have become more prevalent in recent decades. With the legalisation of same-sex marriage in 2017 in Taiwan, it is possible to envision increasing family diversity in the years to come. The current ultra-low fertility observed in this region likely reflects a transitional state of social maladaptation to women’s new roles and rapid family changes. In addition to policies that promote childbearing, governments in East Asia should think about how they can sustain or improve the well-being of their citizens in an ultra-low fertility context. While most existing research on the obstacles to fertility in East Asia studied the married population (Gauthier 2016), obstacles to marriage among the single population (Yoshida 2017) are perhaps equally important in this region. That is, if the demographic realities we are facing now reflect reluctant and involuntary outcomes among the younger generations, governments should perhaps seek to build a more flexible and supportive environment that promotes family formation. If, however, the current low levels of fertility and of marriage represent desirable life choices among the younger generations, then the problems of low fertility and population ageing should probably be tackled from angles other than through pro-natalist policies, such as investing more in automation to counter the labour shortage and expanding migration to maintain a more sustainable tax base. After all, securing the welfare of the young and the old living in low-fertility contexts should always be the main policy priority.