That is certainly true but they also seem willing to go much further than any country has before in an attempt to reverse their population growth decline.
No amount of incentives have managed to push fertility rate above replacement level in any country as far as I can remember.
The data from countries like India also shows that as soon as any region experiences even moderate prosperity, birth rates drop like a rock. Heck, India’s fertility rate is now below replacement level and it happened waaay ahead of schedule.
They banned for-profit tutoring to bring down the cost of raising children (but also ensure children have time to be children). These services are now offered by or in-cooperation with the state school system and no-longer teach the same subjects as are taught during normal school hours. i.e they basically converted it into educational after-school day-care that is strictly non-profit.
1 child policy was replaced by 2 child policy, then 3 and finally abolished. Ironically this was only ever applied to Han Chinese, minorities like Ughyrs have always had uncapped family sizes (another massively misunderstood fact about China but getting into it would just lead to downvote brigade by people that have never even been to China).
So yeah the plan is to reduce cost of living, drive down costs of having children in particular, allow people to have as many children as they want and soon I imagine we will see direct incentives to have children.
China won’t reverse anything and their authoritarian nature will (as always) lead to ruin.
With China, we’ve seen it go both ways: Disaster under Mao and revitalization under Deng Xiaoping. What will leadership under Xi look like? Remains to be seen.
I don't know very much about him yet, but his life seems to be a fascinating one of gently guiding a failing state (that failed on epic proportions) back into normalcy and then into rapid growth.
Take away The West's (citizens) bailing out their financial markets (circa 2007 / 08) and again authoritarian ruin doesn't look so bad.
I'm not stumping for China or authoritarianism; only pointing out that it's early days and there's more to that picture than brash big brush judgements.
I'm from the west and I've never heard a defense or Chinese perspective. I understand that a lot of media we consume in the US is biased, especially on domestic issues abroad. Can you provide a link that explains the misunderstanding?