Soft propaganda and the marginalized childcare policy in China

Childcare policies across all national contexts are deeply embedded within broader macroeconomic and political logics. China vividly illustrates this pattern: the transition from the single-child to the universal three-child policy signifies an increasingly growing and highly visible state intervention in childcare provision. This study investigates how childcare policies have been formulated, evolved, and disseminated across distinct population policy periods. Adopting a constructivist perspective, it employs content analysis to examine the themes and framing of childcare issues in Chinese news articles. Drawing on a corpus of 510 People’s Daily news reports published between 1949 and 2020, the analysis reveals that the Chinese government has systematically delegated childcare responsibility to families and the market, consistently marginalizing it to more privileged state agendas, including women’s labor mobilization, market reforms and public welfare restructuring, and fertility stimulation. To secure public compliance with these objectives, the Chinese party-state has persistently deployed multiple soft propaganda strategies, namely proxy-based messaging, emotionally resonant journalistic discourse, and soft criticism. These findings challenge conventional assumptions that authoritarian states rely exclusively on coercive hard propaganda. The study underscores the urgency of child-centered policy frameworks and more balanced media reporting, while illuminating the intricate dynamics of policy communication within authoritarian governance structures.