Reproductive cultures in crisis: Online memes and the challenge to pronatalism in China

This article examines three popular online memes – Fur Babies, Little Milk Dogs, and Garlic Chives – as cultural strategies employed by Chinese netizens to counter state pronatalism in the context of China’s persistently low fertility and the ineffectiveness of policy measures designed to tackle it. While many countries around the world are experiencing declining total fertility rates (TFRs), China faces ‘ultra-low fertility’ and a declining population caused both by its ‘compressed modernity’ and the consequences of its, now repealed, one-child policy. In response to ‘fertility anxiety’, China introduced a two-child policy in 2016 and subsequently three-child policy in 2021, but has offered little to mitigate growing economic pressures on young people. Our analysis explores online responses to the three-child policy through three common memes – Fur Babies (pets), Little Milk Dogs (young men who date older more successful women), and Garlic Chives (people who are burned out then sacked by employers). We argue that these memes, each attracting many thousands of engagements, demonstrate the evolving reproductive culture and the rise of Sang (defeatist) culture among Chinese young people. Using China as a case study in the context of global fertility decline in high-income countries, we argue that state attempts to bolster fertility without improving material conditions result in anger, despair, and ‘reproductive avoidance’. Moving beyond shifts in family size, we analyse the consequences for the sex/gender system and the implications for intimacy and politics in the societal shift from one child to none.