A 2022 survey found that more women than men — 65 percent versus 48 percent — don’t want children. They’re doubling down by avoiding matrimony (and its conventional pressures) altogether. The other term in South Korea for birth strike is “marriage strike.”
2022年的一项调查显示，不愿要孩子的女性多于男性（65%对48%）。她们干脆拒绝结婚（以及伴随婚姻而来的压力）来强化这一立场。在韩国，生育罢工的另一个说法就是“不婚”。
The trend is killing South Korea. For three years in a row, the country has recorded the lowest fertility rate in the world, with women of reproductive age having fewer than one child on average. It reached the “dead cross,” when deaths outnumbered births, in 2020, nearly a decade earlier than expected.
这一趋势正在扼杀韩国。该国连续三年录得全球最低生育率，育龄妇女平均生育不到一个孩子。韩国在2020年到达“死亡交叉点”，即死亡人数超过出生人数，比预期提前了近十年。
Now, about half of the country’s 228 cities, counties and districts risk losing so many residents they might vanish. Day care centers and kindergartens are being converted into nursing homes. Ob-Gyn clinics are closing, and funeral parlors are opening. At Seoksan Elementary School, in rural Gunwi County, the student body has shrunk from 700 pupils to four. When last I visited, the children couldn’t even form a soccer team.
如今，在全国228个市、道和区中，约有一半面临人口锐减导致行政区划撤销的危险。日托中心和幼儿园正在被改造成养老院。妇科诊所接连关闭，殡仪馆不断开张。在军威郡农村地区的石山小学，学生人数从700人减少到四人。我上次造访时候，孩子们甚至都没法凑成一支足球队。
Young Koreans have well-documented reasons not to start a family, including the staggering costs of raising children, unaffordable homes, lousy job prospects and soul-crushing work hours. But women in particular are fed up with this traditionalist society’s impossible expectations of mothers. So they’re quitting.
韩国年轻人不愿成家的理由其来有自，包括育儿的惊人成本、负担不起的住房、黯淡的工作前景和让人精疲力尽的工作时间。但女性尤其受够了传统社会对母亲不切实际的期望。所以她们选择拒绝。
President Yoon Suk-yeol, elected last year, has suggested feminism is to blame for blocking “healthy relationships” between men and women. But he’s got it backward — gender equality is the solution to falling birthrates. Many of the Korean women shunning dating, marriage and childbirth are sick of pervasive sexism and furious about a culture of violent chauvinism. Their refusal to be “baby-making machines,” according to protest banners I’ve seen, is retaliation. “The birth strike is women’s revenge on a society that puts impossible burdens on us and doesn’t respect us,” says Jiny Kim, 30, a Seoul office worker who’s intent on remaining childless.
去年当选的尹锡悦总统表示，女性主义是阻碍男女“健康关系”发展的罪魁祸首。但这是本末倒置——实现性别平等才是解决出生率下滑的办法。许多逃避约会、婚姻和生育的韩国女性厌倦了无处不在的性别歧视，对暴力沙文主义的文化愤怒不已。拒绝成为“生育机器”——我见过有抗议横幅这么写——是她们的反击手段。“生育罢工是女性对社会的报复，这个社会给我们施加了无法承受的负担，也不尊重我们，”30岁的首尔上班族、无意要小孩的珍妮·金（音）说道。
Making life fairer and safer for women would work wonders toward reducing the country’s existential threat. Yet this feminist dream seems increasingly far-fetched, as Mr. Yoon’s conservative government champions regressive policies that only magnify the problem.
让女性过上更公平、更安全的生活才能切实缓解韩国所面临的存亡威胁。然而，这个女性主义梦想似乎越来越遥不可及，因为尹锡悦的保守政府只会倡导放大问题的倒退政策。
South Korea’s demographic crisis was once inconceivable: As late as the 1960s, women had six children on average. But the state, pursuing economic development, carried out an aggressive population control campaign. In about 20 years, women were having fewer than the 2.1 children needed for replenishment, a number that’s only continued to drop. The latest available data from South Korea’s statistics agency put the fertility rate at 0.81 for 2021; by the third quarter of 2022 it was 0.79.
韩国曾是看似不可能发生人口危机的国家：直到20世纪60年代，这里的女性平均生育六名子女。但为了追求经济发展，韩国大力推行计划生育运动。在大约20年时间里，女性生育数量少于人口补足所需的2.1个，而且一降再降。韩国统计部门的最新数据显示，2021年的生育率为0.81；2022年第三季度该数字为0.79。
Recent governments have indeed been alarmed by a rate that’s seemingly approaching zero. Over 16 years, 280 trillion won ($210 billion) has been poured into programs encouraging procreation, such as a monthly allowance for parents of newborns.
面对似乎正在接近零的生育率，最近几届政府确实感到紧张。过去16年间，政府将280万亿韩元的资金投入到鼓励生育的项目上，例如每月为新生儿父母发放津贴。
Many women still say nope. No wonder. There’s little escaping suffocating gender norms, whether in pregnancy guidelines to arrange clean undergarments for your husband before labor, or the dayslong kitchen drudgework for holidays like the Chuseok harvest festival. Married women are saddled with the lion’s share of chores and child care, squeezing new mothers so much that many give up professional ambitions. Even in dual-income households, wives daily spend more than three hours on these tasks versus their husband’s 54 minutes.
许多女性仍然拒绝。这并不奇怪。无论是生产前为丈夫准备干净内衣的孕期指南，还是在韩国中秋节等节假日在厨房里干数天重活，女性还是很难逃脱令人窒息的性别规范。已婚女性承担了大部分家务和育儿责任，新手妈妈的压力如此之大，以至于许多人放弃了职业抱负。即使是双职工家庭，妻子每天干这些活的时间超过三小时，而丈夫只有54分钟。
Discrimination against working mothers by employers is also absurdly common. In one notorious case, the country’s top baby formula maker was accused of pressuring female employees to quit after getting pregnant.
雇主对职场母亲的歧视也极其普遍。在一个令人发指的案例中，韩国最大的婴儿配方奶粉制造商被指控迫使怀孕的员工辞职。
And gender-based violence is “shockingly widespread,” according to Human Rights Watch. In 2021, a woman was murdered or targeted for murder every 1.4 days or less, according to the Korea Women’s Hotline. Women have dubbed the act of ending a relationship without getting a vicious reaction a “safe breakup.”
人权观察组织也表示，在韩国，基于性别的暴力“广泛存在令人震惊”。根据韩国妇女热线统计，2021年，平均每1.4天内就有一名女性被谋杀或成为谋杀目标。女性将结束一段关系而没有遭受恶性报复的体验称为“安全分手”。
But women haven’t passively accepted the toxic masculinity. They’ve organized raucously, from Asia’s most successful #MeToo movement to groups like “4B,” which translates to the “Four nos: no dating, no sex, no marriage and no child-rearing.” The country’s feminist movements have won the decriminalization of abortion and harsher penalties for an epidemic of spycam-porn crimes.
但女性并没有被动地接受有毒的阳刚之气。从亚洲最成功的“我也是”运动，到“4B”（意为“四不：不恋爱、不发生性关系、不婚、不育”）这样的团体，她们的组织声势浩大。韩国的女性主义运动已经取得成果，包括堕胎合法化，以及对偷拍色情犯罪的更严厉惩罚。
Many young Korean men, however, have declared themselves victims of women’s activism. President Yoon rose to power last year by leveraging this resentment. He echoed the dog whistle of men’s rights advocates, declaring that structural sexism no longer exists in South Korea and vowing tougher punishment for false reports of sexual assault.
然而许多韩国年轻男性宣称自己是女性激进运动的受害者。尹锡悦总统去年正是利用这种不满情绪上台。他迎合了男权倡导者的狗哨呼声，宣称韩国制度上的性别歧视已不复存在，并誓言要对虚假的性侵报告给予更严厉的惩罚。
Mr. Yoon’s government is removing the term “gender equality” from school textbooks and has canceled funding for programs to fight everyday sexism. “If you find gender equality and feminism so important, you can do it with your own money and time,” said one lawmaker in his party.
尹锡悦政府正在从教科书上删除“性别平等”一词，并取消了反对日常性别歧视项目的经费。“如果你们觉得性别平等和女权工作如此重要，那大可以花自己的钱和时间去做，”他所在政党的一位议员表示。
The government is also working to dismantle its own headquarters for women’s empowerment — the gender equality ministry. Established in 2001, it’s been transformative in normalizing parental leave for fathers and helping more women achieve workplace seniority.
政府还在努力废除自身的女性赋权总部——女性家族部。该部门于2001年创立，在规范父亲育儿假和帮助更多女性获得职场资历方面发挥了变革性作用。
Comments by the gender equality minister under the Yoon administration illustrate its abandonment of women. In September, Kim Hyun-sook rejected the idea that misogyny was at play when a Seoul Metro worker stabbed a female colleague to death in a subway bathroom after stalking her for years. Ms. Kim also initially declared that the rape and killing of a college student on campus last June was not violence against women and shouldn’t be used to fan “gender conflict.”
尹锡悦执政时期，女性家族部的发言表明了政府对女性的抛弃。去年9月，首尔地铁一名工作人员在跟踪一名女同事多年后，在地铁洗手间内将她刺死，金贤淑否认这与厌女文化有关。金贤淑起初还宣称，去年6月有大学生在校园内遭到奸杀的事件并非针对女性的暴力，不应被用来煽动“性别对立”。
So far, none of the measures implemented by successive governments have flipped the trends in marriage and childbearing. Worse yet, the current government seems to be actively undermining efforts that gave women hope. “This is a historical regression,” says Ms. Chung, who was the gender equality minister from 2017 to 2018. Society can’t end the birth strike without acknowledging women’s grievances, she says.
迄今为止，历届政府颁布的措施都未能扭转结婚和生育率下滑的趋势。更糟糕的是，本届政府似乎在主动破坏给女性带来希望的努力。“这是一种历史的倒退，”曾在2017年至2018年担任女性家族部部长的郑铉栢表示。她说，如果女性的不满得不到承认，社会是无法结束生育罢工的。
Motivating Korean women to reconsider marriage and children involves infusing every aspect of their lives with agency and equality. A feminist approach would remove obstacles to motherhood simply by enforcing existing laws against workplace discrimination. It would destigmatize births outside of marriage and make domestic duties everyone’s responsibility. It would condemn gender violence as reprehensible. A feminist approach would admit there’s a systemic problem.
想让韩国女性重新考虑结婚和生育，就需要将能动性和平等注入到她们生活的方方面面。实现女性主义，只需执行现有的反职场歧视法律，就能为女性清扫做母亲的阻碍。消除非婚生育的污名，让家务成为每个人的责任。对性别暴力进行应有的谴责。实现女性主义，就要承认存在系统性问题。
It’s clear that countries with a disproportionate division of child care or lacking national paid parental leave, like Japan and the United States, also have plunging fertility rates. It’s the same with China, where women inspired by South Korea started their own “Four nos” movement; government data this month reveals its population is shrinking, too. But countries with cooperative fathers and good family policies, like Sweden, or that recognize diverse companionships, like France, have been more successful at stabilizing or even bumping up births.
显然，像日本和美国这样育儿分工失衡或是没有全国性带薪育儿假的国家，生育率也在急剧下降。中国也是如此，受韩国启发的女性开始了自己的“四非”运动；本月公布的政府数据显示其人口也在减少。而在瑞典这样父亲配合担责且家庭政策优良的国家，或是法国这样承认多元伴侣关系的国家，在稳定甚至于提高出生率方面就更为成功。
The United Nations projects that South Korea’s 51 million population will halve before the end of the century. Survival of the nation is at stake.
联合国预计到本世纪末，韩国的5100万人口将减少一半。国家存亡危在旦夕。
Hawon Jung (@allyjung)著有《Flowers of Fire: The Inside Story of South Korea’s Feminist Movement and What It Means for Women’s Rights Worldwide》，她曾是法国新闻社驻首尔记者，目前生活在韩国和德国。
翻译：Harry Wong
