Outrage as scholar asks how can China make women ‘obediently, submissively have children’

A Chinese professor has sparked a public backlash after he asked a visiting Kazakh diplomat how to make Chinese women “have children obediently, early and in large numbers” at a think tank event.

Wang Xianju, a professor at Renmin University and a former counsellor at the Chinese embassy in Belarus, was speaking to Erlan Qarin, the state counsellor of Kazakhstan, who visited the university in November.

Qarin had given a speech on Kazakhstan’s domestic reforms and relations between the two countries at an event hosted by the Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies, a think tank based at the university.

The institute published Wang’s remarks on its WeChat account in November but the article only gained online traction – and criticism – this week. It has since been deleted.

During the question-and-answer period, Wang said he was surprised to find there were many children when he visited Kazakhstan.

He said Kazakhstan apparently had effective policies encouraging births, and he wondered how that might be possible, given that Chinese women did not want to get married and have children, and would not listen to their parents or supervisors.

“I even heard that women in Kazakhstan immediately have children after they graduate college, they have children one after another,” Wang said in a now-deleted WeChat article by the think tank.

“How could they listen to you and obediently, submissively have children, have children early and have lots of children?”