I wonder if that’s the one child policy biting them in the bum. They ditched it nearly ten years ago I think. It ended up causing a few social problems - like the one child left looking after aging parents and grandparents, and the “little emperor” thing of spoiled brats. Also skewed the ratio of men to women quite a bit.

It’s like when they decided sparrows were stealing grain, so they set about killing sparrows in their millions - only to have crops devastated by the insects the sparrows had previously been eating. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Pests_campaign (A billion sparrows, apparently. Idiots.)