Tonight's dinner is limited to 50 paying guests, most of them female, attractive and single. This is the demographic that can't get enough of the queen -- born Chen Yi-li, though she refashioned herself as 'Illy' after the Italian coffee brand. Her sassy tales of righteous freedom, which have been spun into three books and inspired a TV soap opera, make her an icon of sorts for Taiwan's young female 'singletons,' who see marriage and motherhood as a straitjacket.
With one of the world's lowest birth rates, Taiwan faces the prospect of a rapidly aging population without a young workforce to support it. The government is scrambling for solutions, with experts pushing measures such as workplace day care, tax breaks for parents and generous maternity leave. But for a generation of Taiwanese women who embraced higher education (more women than men have college degrees) and demanding careers, the age-old stigma of being unmarried has given way to a celebration of single life that government incentives won't easily overturn.
Government officials also are playing the patriotism card, proposing that children should be seen as a 'public asset.' Peter Hu, director of the National Immigration Agency, says parents create children not just for themselves, but for Taiwan. Such rhetoric seems unlikely to sway Taiwanese weighing the pros and cons of parenting. What's more, those college-educated women who do marry now don't do so until they're 32 on average, meaning their biological window to reproduce is relatively short. (By comparison, the average marrying age in Japan for women of all educational levels was 28.5 as of 2008.)
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2020-09-15
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