Liang Jianzhang on China's Looming Demographic Disaster

Interview with Liang Jianzhang, “Why are Today’s Young People Not Having Children?”[1]
 
Introduction by Freya Ge and David Ownby
 
Introduction
 
Liang Jianzhang (James Liang, b. 1969) is an entrepreneur and a scholar, and a well-known public figure in China.  Clearly gifted, he earned an M.A. in Computer Science at Georgia Tech in 1989 after one year of study, despite the language barrier, and subsequently began a doctorate at Stanford.  However, he was soon drawn to the energy of nearby Silicon Valley, and wound up spending several years at Oracle, both in the United States and China.  He ultimately returned to China and launched a number of entrepreneurial ventures, including Ctrip, a multinational travel service conglomerate headquartered in Shanghai.  At the same time, he remained engaged with the world of ideas, and eventually returned to Stanford to do a Ph.D. in economics, studying the interface between population dynamics and innovation.
 
Liang has long been skeptical of China’s one-child policy, concerned about its long-term implications, and tried to raise questions about it even when doing so was politically fraught.  As Chinese authorities backed away from the policy, Liang found the space to articulate his ideas in books, public lectures, and podcasts which seek to shed light where China is headed now that fewer and fewer young people want to have children, especially in China’s big cities where most of them want to be - because work is too hard and children cost too much.   Japan and South Korea have similar problems, suggesting that China’s one-child policy does not bear full responsibility for China’s dilemma. 
 
Liang’s basic argument is that a stagnant population or, worse, a falling birthrate, eventually will have a large impact on factors such as market demand and even innovation and productivity.  Thus in contrast to the many voices that trumpet the coming “Asian century,” Liang worries that the current advantage East Asian countries have worked so hard to achieve may disappear with declining population over the next few generation. 
 
The interview translated here with the well-known journal Renwu/People was prompted by the publication of Liang’s latest book, Population Strategy:  How Population Impacts the Economy and Innovation in April of 2023.  I have not read the book, but the interview is frank to the point of frightening pessimism.  Liang essentially argues that China is at the brink of a demographic disaster that will be all but inevitable in the absence of major changes in both the allocation of wealth and important institutional changes to lighten the burden of childcare, currently borne largely by Chinese women.  He proposes, for example, that China invest 3 to 5% of its GDP in measures to encourage people to have children.  As if this were not enough, he advocates major changes to the Chinese educational system:  discarding (or radically modifying) the high school and university entrance exams and shortening the educational system by sending people on to the job market after they have completed university (and not after one or more post-graduate degrees).  Among other things, shortening the education system would relieve the burden on Chinese women, who are disproportionately responsible for pushing their children over the many hurdles the Chinese educational system erects.  He also argues that private companies should do more to smooth the way for women to combine work and child-raising, which of course is a challenge in China’s sputtering post-pandemic economy.
 
As a demographer who thinks in terms of big numbers and large structures, Liang had relatively little to say when People asked him about the emotional side of the decision not to have children.  Freya Ge agrees with People that this emotional factor is important, noting that:
 
“In addition to the material fact that elite women choose not to have children because of career or cost difficulties, many young people also tend to choose not to have children because of their memories of their own traumatic upbringing and the new ideological and spiritual trends that are gradually developing in Chinese society.
 
Because of the influence of Confucian culture and other conventional thinking, most parents of my generation unwittingly raised their children in a way that is physically and mentally destructive, unconsciously treating their children as an investment. Young people my age want to stop this trauma, but also worry that that they will not be able to provide a healthy environment for their children because of the way they were brought up. With the degree of involution in Chinese society today, they also worry that their children will face unending pressure without the promise of a happy ending. Discussions of this on the Internet often get thousands of likes; in conversations with my friends, I also find that few of them want to have children, and to my mind, these friends were brought up in comparatively healthy and tolerant families.
 
In addition, with the awakening of female consciousness, women have a different understanding of the role they play in society. Compared with the once widely recognized female stereotype of "helping the husband and educating the children (相夫教子)" and "being an understanding wife and loving mother (贤妻良母)," more women have begun to think about whether marriage and parenting are really what they want.”
 
In any event, my impression is that demographers, like public health specialists, or, sadly, climate change experts, often wind up playing an “I told you so” role in society, because until disaster strikes, governments can’t be bothered to pay attention and allocate resources, and society can’t be bothered to mobilize to make them do so.
 
Translation by Freya Ge and David Ownby
 
 A warning concerning negative population growth
 
 People:  In 2022, the number of births in China was only 9.56 million, indicating a negative rate of natural increase. What was your reaction when you saw this data?
 
Liang Jianzhang: I was a little shocked.  I’ve been following population projections for a long time, so I know what to expect, and the fall in the number of births from 18 million to 10 million per year after the liberalization of the two-child policy was within the curve of expectations, but if you think about it, we’re only talking about six or seven years, and the numbers have fallen by almost 50%, in a period of peace and prosperity to boot, which leaves me a bit shaken.  Japan has seen similar declines, but nothing so fast in such a short period. 
 
People: From a demographer's perspective, what does it mean for a country to have negative population growth? What do you think is missing from the public debate?
 
Liang Jianzhang: In the real world, we all know that the welfare of the elderly is provided by the young. If two elderly people are both from one-child families, then when the four parents are all old, the burden of supporting will be too heavy for the children, and most people will not be able to handle it.  The social problems this brings will mean a decline in living standards.
 
But what many people fail to understand is that population decline is not just a question of labor, but also of innovation and overall competitiveness.
 
Most people focus only on the total population, which, for what it’s worth, fell only slightly, masking the sharp drop in births. What you're going to see right away is that maybe half of the primary schools and kindergartens won’t be able to find students. The bigger effect is that twenty years from now, the workforce will be half of what it once was, and demand for everything will go the same direction – down - which will affect industries across the board. With demand halved, the impact on a country's competitiveness and innovation is more than halved. If society as a whole is less innovative, it will grab less of the global pie.

Population alone has a scale effect, as four people are always stronger than two.  When you have a lot of people, you have a positive scale effect, there are more people to cooperate with, and the bigger your markets are, the more you can spread your costs.  If you go from four people to two, the scale effect shrinks things by more than half. This will greatly impact China's innovation twenty years down the road.
 
People: In your new book, Population Strategy, you predict that at China's current low fertility rate, the low projection scenario predicts that we will lose our demographic advantage within one hundred years. What is the basis for this prediction? And what does it mean if this scenario actually comes true?
 
Liang Jianzhang:  This is based on fertility projections, which take the underlying causes into account, and the evidence tells us that what is causing low fertility in China is getting worse.
 
At present, the factors affecting childbearing in China are the cost of education, the cost of housing, and [the lack of] social benefits. The difference between our high, medium, and low forecasts is actually based on predictions concerning maternity benefits.  Housing prices in China are high and there is no short-term solution; China provides less benefits than other countries; and the only country that can compare with China in terms of the level of “involution”[2] in their educational system is South Korea. Currently, South Korea's fertility rate is below 1, meaning that on average, each couple has less than one child. China's fertility rate is currently 1.1, but South Korea is investing in maternity benefits, which might boost the fertility rate a little. China’s rate may fall to that of South Korea in the future.

It is easy to understand that our demographic advantage will be lost in one hundred years. A century is four generations, and in 2022 China had 9.56 million births.  If the average person lives to be 80 years old, and if the rate of decline continues at 50%, then twenty-five years from now, the number of births will be four million plus, and if this continues for another generation, then in 50 years there may only be 2 or 3 million new births. China's total population is now 1.4 billion, and if it is a fourth of this after two generations and an eighth after three, then a hundred years from now, the total population may still be four or five hundred million, but given the declining population trend, we will be heading for two hundred million people.

Nigeria currently has a population of only two hundred million, but since it has a birth rate of more than five times that of China, if this trend continues, within a decade there will be more births per year in Nigeria than in China. According to Yuwa’s[3] population forecast report, in the absence of effective policies to encourage people to have children, China's population will be reduced to 1.17 billion by 2050, and to 479 million by 2100; its proportion of the world's overall population will be reduced from 17% to 4.8%, and China’s newborn population will be only 0.89% of the world's newborn population.
 
This also means that China's status as a populous country will become history. I don’t want to be alarmist, but the average birth rate of Chinese couples is 1.1 children, which is already lower than 1.5, the warning line for fertility generally accepted by the international community. And the fertility rate in Beijing and Shanghai is only one-third that of replacement level, which is not cause for optimism. If we don’t come up with a policy that will greatly encourage people to reproduce, then we can kiss China’s status as a large-population country goodbye.
 
People: There's a term in your book, “fertility decline inertia.” Where does this lead us?
 
Liang Jianzhang:  It’s a kind of vicious circle. If a society gets used to people not having children or having only one child, then it won’t be all that friendly to families with more children.  We will only build small houses, and hotels won’t have rooms for bigger families.
 
Why are young people reluctant to have children?
 
People:  You also compare Japan's situation with China's, and whether we are talking about housing or education, Japan is shockingly expensive. Why do you worry more about China’s situation?
 
Liang Jianzhang: Housing prices have to be considered in the context of available income, and except for prime areas of Tokyo, Japan's prices are not so high. While housing prices in Tokyo are similar to those in China's first-tier cities, they are not as expensive as in Shenzhen, Shanghai, and Beijing. Housing prices in other Japanese cities are a bit cheaper than in China, especially when you take incomes into account. Japan's education is more involuted than in Europe and the United States, but not as involuted as in China. Elementary school students in Japan have better basic habits than in China.  You can see them going to school on their own, with their little backpacks, and doing their homework on their own.  This is healthy.  Japan's current policy to encourage people to have children is more positive than before, and maternity benefits are better. In the past, Japan was considered the world’s worst example, but in fact, our problems are much worse than Japan's.
 
Although Japan also has a considerable number of people who do not marry or have children, families that have children usually have more than two, and the average number in of births in Japan is 1.3-1.4, while in Korea it’s 0.8. China is somewhere in between, but in China’s major cities, the situation is worse than in South Korea. In the future, China's young people will continue to flock to the big cities, and their behavior will be closer to that of big city people, and things will be much worse than they are in Japan.  Only when we can match Japan’s reproductive friendliness in policy terms, and then go on to try to catch up with the policies of the Scandinavian countries – only then might we avoid the economic problems Japan is experiencing.
 
People: What do you think of the child-raising environment in China? How much does it cost on average for a couple to raise a child in China?

Liang Jianzhang: The cost of raising children in China is virtually the highest in the world.   A more objective way of calculating this is to divide the cost of childbearing minus benefits by per capita GDP.  In Scandinavia, you wind up with a number that is two- or three-times per capita GDP.  In China and South Korea, the number is six or seven, which means that it takes six or seven years of income to raise a child. The current total cost of raising a child in China averages some half a million RMB (approx. 69,000 USD$), and in big cities like Beijing and Shanghai, it’s close to double that. The cost of childbearing has a direct impact on the fertility rate, which is why the Chinese people’s willingness to have children and their fertility rate are virtually the lowest in the world.
 
People: Have you looked at China’s fertility map? We took a look, and noticed the fertility rate in China's first-tier cities and Dongbei is only 0.7-0.9, with Beijing having the lowest rate in the country. From a regional perspective, the reasons for Beijing's low fertility rate are not the same as those of Dongbei. What factors are positively correlated with fertility?
 
Liang Jianzhang: Dongbei’s urbanization rate is high, but its overall economy is not in good shape, and incomes are relatively low. This puts a lot of pressure on young people because their role is to create new industries and job opportunities, and if this is missing, economic development will slow even further, and more young people will go elsewhere. Most of these young people migrate to the first-tier cities; living in these new cities as outsiders, their living costs are great, and they experience a great deal of housing pressure.
 
From this perspective, although the housing price and living costs in Northeast China are relatively low compared with first-tier cities, the economic downturn, population loss, low income, and high stress of raising children for the people who stayed still results in a relatively low fertility rate. Everything is a matter of the feedback you get from where you live.
 
We can compare Dongbei with Guangdong. Guangdong's economy is thriving, and there are many opportunities for young people, and while Shenzhen has high housing prices, the fertility rate of Guangdong as a whole is still higher than in other places.
 
People: You also mentioned education in your top three factors that affect fertility. Is helicopter parenting[4] a Chinese characteristic?
 
Liang Jianzhang: Helicopter parenting is not a bad thing, because it shows that parents care about their children's education, but if leads to unnecessary testing, then it is a bad thing. The involution of education has grown worse and worse over the past few years. Education takes longer, because now a Master’s degree is the equivalent of what the B.A. used to be.  So, I think the fundamental problem is the national College Entrance Exam (gaokao/高考). Middle and high school students invest at least two years’ time in reviewing and studying for the entrance exams for high school and university, although there’s no longer any point in memorizing a bunch of stuff these days, since you can just look it up online. In addition, having a teenager choose what they want to do with their life is an inefficient use of education, and the entire system having to do with the gaokao needs to change.
 
The social impact of elite women not having children
 
People: You don't seem to talk much about emotional factors. For example, some young people choose not to have children or to have fewer children because of trauma they faced growing up, or because their expectations for the future have disappeared, and so on. Many young people feel as if they are living in a huge machine where they have a hard time breathing, and thus lose the will to have children. How do you see this?
 
Liang Jianzhang:  This is how things are all over the world. The more independent women become, the less they tend to choose the traditional path of marriage. I don't really see any way to go back to the time when women were not independent and had to get married in order to live.
 
It is even harder for single women to have children, and the pressure of raising a family by yourself is greater than if you are a couple. If there were no cost to raising children, then everyone would feel like raising children is more rewarding than raising cats and dogs - this is just human nature. Single women's high educational level means that they are actually the elite of society, and if they choose not to have children, there will be a huge negative impact on society in the terms of quality and quantity of our future population.
 
People: So you see this problem as one of women being less eager to have children once they are educated, meaning that the dilemma is unavoidable.

Liang Jianzhang: Yes, there will definitely be fewer traditional families and more non-traditional families. All our society can do is provide various benefits and reduce the cost of child-raising. This also has to do with the social identity and legal status of children from non-traditional families. If benefits improve, and we move forward with assisted reproduction, sperm banks, etc., and such things are gradually accepted by society to the point that it satisfies the desire of single women to have children, then it will help to improve the fertility rate.
 
People: There are still many women who do not have children or have fewer children because they feel that having children will reduce their competitiveness in the workplace. In China's broader employment environment, women of childbearing age still face hidden discrimination in the job market. If these well-educated professional women are encouraged to have children, how can they balance the workplace dilemma?

Liang Jianzhang: Women do have a lot of time constraints and pressures, and the tasks of taking care of children and getting them through school and the examinations also fall on them.  Children used to be able to start work when they were 20, but now they need a Master’s degree so it’s 25, leaving women very little time to pursue career development as they organize their families, and there is only a ten-year window phase before they turn 35. This is a huge problem, and my suggestion is to reform the gaokao and shorten the school system.

From a longer-term perspective, the opportunity cost of a woman's career is not necessarily higher than that of a man, given that now work is mainly mental rather than physical, and that women live longer.  So having two children may cost a few years, but from the perspective of a woman’s entire career, it may not necessarily be shorter than a man’s.
 
Companies should try their best to provide a better environment for women in this crucial period of their lives. If we could reach the point where women had two or three children, we would also see a scale effect, since the cost of raising two or three children is not a matter of simple multiplication. Once children are no longer infants, we can provide better nursery care or in-home support until the child reaches kindergarten age, all of which would lower the costs women bear. If we could get through this ten-year period smoothly, women's and men's career paths would be on the same starting line.
  
People: In terms of what companies should do, at Ctrip[5] you have implemented a hybrid 3+2[6] office model, and have offered women better maternity benefits. Has the implementation of these systems been smooth, or was there some resistance? In practice, how far are we from balancing fertility and protection of women's rights and interests?
 
Liang Jianzhang: At the outset, Ctrip had a hard time, because it was a new experiment and nobody knew how it would turn out, although some foreign companies are already practicing the same policies. I advocated the hybrid 3+2 office model six or seven years ago, at first only in some parts of the company, and it worked out pretty well, but it was a long-term ideological struggle to try to expand to on the company as a whole, mainly because managers were skeptical. Although I was the head of the company, it was still hard.
 
Then came the pandemic, and people had no choice but to try and get used to telecommuting. At that stage, there was still disagreement within the company, so we first experimented in specific departments, randomly selecting people to work at home, and conducting controlled experiments to check the work efficiency and turnover rate of these people. It turned out that the data looked good, the employees saved time on commuting, the environmental impact was positive, so finally, management decided to promote it. In fact, the pandemic is to thank for the timing of all this.  Later on, people gradually got used to it, and it began to become a new company culture, which was also helpful in our recruitment efforts.
 
There are also measures such as assisted childbearing for women, bonuses for giving birth, and paid leave for women. At first glance, the cost of these reproductive benefits for women is relatively high, and we have not fully deployed them throughout the company, and they are only available to managers and those even higher up.  But even for ordinary employees, if we think about their salary, career development, and benefits, this will improve their loyalty, which is good for the company. I hope other companies will consider such measures.
 
Should we spend a lot of money to encourage people to have children?
 
People: In recent years, China has introduced a range of policies to encourage childbearing, having moved from the one-child policy to the two-child policy, and now encouraging people to have as many as three children.  Sichuan and other places are also promoting the legalization of single mothers having children. Why are fertility rates still falling?
 
Liang Jianzhang: Because right now, maternity benefits are scarce, there is no place where you don’t have to line up for free public daycare, and there is no maternity bonus. There are a handful of places where they give you a few thousand RMB for having a child, or maybe ten thousand plus, but this is nothing when compared with the hundreds of thousands of RMB you pay to raise your child. If you want to talk about a bonus, then it needs to be several thousand RMB per month if it is to be useful, and it needs to continue until the child reaches the age of 18.  If we really want to improve social welfare, we still need to spend 3%-5% of GDP for it to have an effect. The population issue is China’s biggest economic problem and devoting a few percent of our GDP to solve our biggest problem is necessary and worthwhile.
 
People: Three to five percent of GDP is more than we spend on education and healthcare.  Can we really afford to spend so much money to encourage people to have children?

Liang Jianzhang: The way to think about this is to ask whether the population issue is the most important question facing China’s future.  Can we stomach going from a big-population country to a small-population country?  If we can’t, then how much money are we willing to spend to solve the problem?
 
Five percent of GDP represents only one year of economic growth.  If we take that money to solve this huge problem, if means that this year we stay at last year’s living standard and invest the money we save in families with children. This is not a waste of money, but instead a redistribution of social wealth.  Our investment in infrastructure is about 10% higher than that of other countries, but China will not need so much infrastructure in the future. What is the point of building all these new cities if we no longer have a large population? Once we redistribute resources in this way, the entire society can use these resources to have more children.
 
Think about it this way: you are a person in your 50s or 60s, and your child has just gotten married and told you that they aren’t going to have children.  Would you be willing to take one year of your salary – not the 5% of GDP I was just talking about – and say to your son and daughter-in-law that if they have a child, you will give them this sum of money to help them with the costs of raising the child?  Of course you would.  A small family may not have that much money, and parents have their own lives to consider, but they can still manage to do this, and society as a whole should also find the money and the will to do it.[7]
 
People: Of the top ten most populous countries in the world, only the United States is a developed country. In this group, we also find some of the world's least developed countries, such as Bangladesh, Pakistan,etc. From this perspective, the positive correlation between population and economy, innovation, and entrepreneurship seems not to function. How do you explain this? How should we understand the relationship between the population and the economy, population, and innovation?

Liang Jianzhang: At present, the countries where artificial intelligence, the Internet, and 5G technology are the most developed are the United States and China. The United States has the largest population of all developed countries and is the world's innovation center for high technology, the Internet, movies, and financial services. Meanwhile, China has long been the most populous developing country (India's population did not pass China’s until 2023). In the entire world, only China and the United States have huge amounts of data, large-scale computing, and the capacity to exploit them. Thus, the world's largest Internet and artificial intelligence companies are concentrated in the United States and China.
 
We can compare ourselves with India, which is also a populous country and shares a similar history with us, with a planned economy that was once relatively closed to foreign trade. In its initial stage, infrastructure and basic resources were India’s chief focus, and even education lagged behind at that point.  Innovation was not the most important point at this stage, and government policy lead everything.  The most crucial thing they wanted to do was to bring in technology and infrastructure from other countries.
 
China was like this before reform and opening.  Under such circumstances, no matter how large or small the population was, we were still poor. After reform and opening, we began to implement the right economic policies, at which point our large population became an advantage. At the outset, this advantage may have been only cheap labor, but this labor was building infrastructure, and when the whole country began moving toward the middle- and high-income stage, economies of scale kicked in, and innovation became more and more important. Among developed countries, the United States has the largest scale advantage, and Europe, Germany, and the old Japan – before its problems – can also innovate by bringing certain industries together. 
 
China is now transitioning to this stage.  India has not yet reached this stage as its infrastructure is far less efficient than China’s. So, in contrast to India, the efficiency of China's population will grow in the future. But that advantage is slipping as fertility rates fall.
 
The quality of a population is inseparable from its quantity. Small countries can't build rockets, and if they try to manufacture semiconductors it is easy to stymy them . Now artificial intelligence and automation are also developing, which will reduce the need for some types of people, but other types remain irreplaceable.  We need a generation of geniuses to drive a generation of innovation, and the geniuses you find in a pool of a thousand people are not the same as those in a pool of ten thousand.
 
 "Entrepreneurs are more likely to understand that more people is a good thing."
 
People: As an entrepreneur, why have you always been so focused on population? When did you first start paying attention to this issue?
 
Liang Jianzhang:  When I went to Stanford in 2007 to do my Ph.D. in economics, I was basically hoping to make a contribution to academic research. Stanford is right next to Silicon Valley, which was the center of global innovation and entrepreneurship at that time, so it was natural for me to take innovation as an important research topic. My research led me to discover the important relationship between population and innovation, but at that time China was still implementing the one-child policy, which was very contradictory. When I talked about my views back then, many people doubted me, and discussion of the topic was not really permitted.  Also, I didn’t have a full set of statistical data, so I came to feel that I had the responsibility to change things.
 
People: Does that have anything to do with being an entrepreneur? For enterprises, those who use their products are people, so when China's population changes, are entrepreneurs the first to worry?
 
Liang Jianzhang: Entrepreneurs are more likely to understand why more people is a good thing, while economists are less sensitive to this issue. Now the government is beginning to understand, and local governments are scrambling for talent. Ordinary people may not see the whole picture, but young people are quick to see the negative effects of aging societies, as the impact on them is particularly acute.
 
People: Many people think that your proposals overlook the particular dilemmas of young people and that "real people" are missing. What do you say to this?
 
Liang Jianzhang:  Everybody has their own ideas, as well as their own preferences. I am not telling people how many children to have.  All we can do is look at things from an overall perspective and say that, given what most people want, what we can do is to reduce the cost of childbearing to allow people who want to have children, or even a lot of children, to face fewer obstacles. If we can satisfy these people, then there will be no problem and the positive cycle can continue.
 
People: How do you divide your energy between being an entrepreneur and a researcher? How much of you is which?
 
Liang Jiangzhang: I’d say it’s a ratio of 7 to 3. I still spend most of my time at the company. Now that the pandemic is over, there are many new opportunities in the tourism industry, and our overall business is developing very well. The more we open up, the more we travel and interact with different people and different cultures, and the better our ideas will be.
 
People: What's a little question you've been thinking about lately?
 
Liang Jianzhang: Recently, I have been thinking about some issues related to education, for example how to reduce the pressure and benefit the population at the same time.  This might involve reforming the gaokao and universalizing a system of ten years’ basic education [i.e., middle school, high school, and university], so that most young people can complete their college education at the age of 20.  So we make university the norm for everyone and we shift the selection function from the gaokao to the moment of graduation from university.  If most people have finished their education by age 20, many women can choose a partner and have children earlier. I am also thinking about AI, which should have positive effects in the area of education.
 
Notes

[1]跟梁建章对话： “为什么现在的年轻人都不生孩子了？“ Renwu/任务（People）, May 25, 2023.
 
[2]Translator’s note:  “Involution 内卷,” which originally meant farming practices so intensive that they surpassed the point of profitability (see for example the classic studies of Clifford Geertz, such as Agricultural Involution: The Process of Agricultural Change in Indonesia, 1963) now refers to the intense pressure many people feel as students, as parents, and in the workplace in China, the feeling of “running in place” no matter how hard you try.  See here for a concise discussion.

[3] The Yuwa Population Research Think Tank (育娲人口研究智库) is a public welfare institution dedicated to population and related public policy research founded by Liang Jianzhang.

[4] Translator’s note:  The Chinese term is jiwa/鸡娃 – “chicken blood” -  and refers to the legend that parents will "inject their children with chicken blood" in the hopes that they will be outstanding and successful, like a rooster, a practice that is no longer followed, if it ever was. 
 
[5] Translator’s note:  Ctrip is an online ticketing service company and a leading hotel, air and train ticket booking service center in China, founded by Liang Jianzhang.

[6] Translator’s note:  A system in which the five workdays consist of three office days and two days of telecommuting. 

[7]Translator’s note:  This idea surely reflects high savings rates in China. In my view, few North American families would be able to take a year’s salary from their savings to help their children have children.  One study notes that the average American household has roughly $40,000 in savings.