From Social Policy to Parenthood: Insights From a Factorial Survey in Northeast China

Low fertility and population ageing have prompted renewed attention to pronatalist social policy, yet evidence on its effectiveness in East Asia remains limited. This article investigates the impact of pronatalist policy interventions on childbearing intentions in China, using a factorial survey experiment conducted in Shenyang, the capital of Liaoning province, emblematic of the country's demographic crisis. We examine three policy domains, including decommodification, defamilisation, and degenderisation, alongside context-specific familisation risks. A core contribution is a gendered interaction analysis revealing that women and men respond to fundamentally different policy logics. Women's intentions are most positively shaped by decommodification measures that provide direct financial compensation for care work, directly offsetting the motherhood penalty. In stark contrast, men's responsiveness is contingent on structural security (notably housing), a prerequisite for engaging with family policies, while they remain largely insensitive to marginal financial incentives. Beyond this gendered dichotomy, we find that while public childcare expansion paradoxically reduced intentions—likely reflecting quality concerns—universal work-life balance and gender equality measures proved effective for both genders. Furthermore, the strong positive effects of intergenerational support and homeownership highlight the critical role of ‘supported familisation’ in the Chinese context. The study concludes that effective pronatalist strategies must move beyond ‘one-size-fits-all’ instruments to explicitly synchronise resource substitution for women with structural security for men, underpinned by universal measures to degenderise time.