When a State Taxes Condoms: China, Fertility, and the Error of Confusing Compliance With Desire
Saturday, January 3, 2026. This is for the Chinese therapists I train at Lingyu Psychology.
China has decided that condoms and contraceptive pills should now cost more.
As of January 1 2026, a three-decade-old tax exemption on contraceptive drugs and devices has been removed. Condoms and oral contraceptives are now subject to a 13% value-added tax—the standard rate applied to shampoo, socks, and kitchen appliances.
This is not a technical adjustment. It is a philosophical one.
The policy rests on a familiar and stubborn error: confusing fertility with compliance.
The assumption is that if pregnancy becomes harder to avoid, births will follow. But fertility has never worked that way—not in Europe, not in East Asia, not anywhere modern life has made adulthood fragile.
People do not have children because they are cornered. They have children because life feels survivable.
A Small Scene the Policy Cannot See
Picture a couple in Shanghai. Both are educated. Both are employed. On paper, they are doing everything right.
In practice, they are supporting aging parents, paying most of their income toward housing, navigating a labor market that punishes interruption, and living with the knowledge that one mistake—one illness, one layoff—has no soft landing.
They are not anti-child. They are anti-exposure.
Raising the price of condoms does not change that calculation. It sharpens it.
Symbolic Pronatalism, Repeated
This policy belongs to a well-worn global genre: symbolic pronatalism.
You raise the cost of contraception.
You introduce childcare subsidies.
You urge universities to teach “love education.”
You encourage citizens to adopt “positive marriage and childbearing attitudes.”
These gestures share a defining feature: they treat fertility as a messaging problem rather than a risk problem.
The message is optimism.
The lived experience is precarity.
When the two diverge, people delay—not because they misunderstand marriage, but because they understand it too well.
The Long Shadow of Policy Memory
China’s falling birth rate did not begin this year, or last year, or even with the pandemic. It is the cumulative outcome of decades in which reproduction was regulated, monitored, and moralized.
The one-child policy trained multiple generations to associate fertility with surveillance and penalty. Ending the policy did not end its psychological residue. Reintroducing state pressure at the level of contraception quietly reactivates it.
You cannot spend thirty-five years teaching citizens that reproduction is dangerous and then expect them to experience it as safe simply because the instruction has changed.
Memory outlasts policy.
The Psychological Misread
The deeper mistake here is psychological.
The state is misreading lowered fertility as lowered desire. What has actually declined is permission—permission to take an irreversible risk in a system that offers little forgiveness.
People have children when:
the future feels narratable.
relationships feel capable of absorbing strain.
and institutions function as shock absorbers rather than amplifiers.
When those conditions disappear, birth rates fall regardless of moral messaging. Not because people dislike children, but because children magnify instability.
This is not a values problem.
It is a confidence problem.
“Love Education” and the Technocratic Romance
The call for “love education” in universities reveals the same misunderstanding. It assumes young adults are confused about intimacy, marriage, or family.
They are not confused. They are observant.
They see marriage structured as a high-liability contract with uneven labor expectations and limited institutional backup. They see parenting framed as a totalizing performance with catastrophic consequences for failure. They see careers that punish caregiving and housing markets that punish continuity.
No curriculum corrects that.
You cannot lecture people into trust.
What Taxing Condoms Actually Signals
When a state taxes contraception in the name of fertility, it sends a signal—whether intended or not—that reproduction remains a matter of state interest rather than shared responsibility.
The result is not renewed confidence. It is withdrawal.
People delay marriage.
They delay commitment.
They delay hope.
Some leave. Others stay and opt out quietly.
The Larger Diagnosis
A society that cannot make room for children is not experiencing a demographic problem.
It is experiencing a trust collapse.
Trust that work will not disappear overnight.
Trust that care will be shared.
Trust that vulnerability will not be punished.
Trust that love will be supported rather than extracted.
Until those conditions change, fertility will remain low—no matter how expensive condoms become, or how upbeat the slogans sound.
You cannot tax your way back to confidence.
You have to build it otherwise, somehow..
Be Well, Stay Kind, and Godspeed.