Investigating the Impact of China's Parenting Leave System on the Infant Care of Urban Dual-Earner Families: Gender Division of Domestic Labour, Care

"China, grappling with sub-replacement fertility, transitioned from the one-child policy in 2015 to a two-child limit and subsequently implemented a three-child policy in 2021. The parenting leave system has also been modified in tandem to incentivise fertility further. Since 2016, besides the statutory 98-day maternity leave, first-time mothers receive at least 30 additional days after childbirth and are eligible for 60+ days for second or third children.

Fathers are encouraged to take paternity leave (7-30 days), while spouses get 5-10 days of parental leave annually until the child turns 3, regulated by provinces. These recent policy changes, targeted at a clear demographic phenomenon, enable empirical investigation into how parenting leave policy shifts are expected to transform fertility, and what barriers there may be in achieving these changes.

This research explores the share of domestic labour in Chinese urban dual-earner couples when taking these 2016 new parenting leaves, dedicated to examining the policy's role in (re)constructing gender roles and care relationalities. By conducting in-depth interviews separately with couples welcoming children after 2016, this qualitative research combines longitudinal study, on the one hand, to see the changes in domestic labour arrangements during different leave-taking stages; and discourse analysis, on the other, to interpret parents' perceptions on gender roles and care relationalities.

This timely research enriches the leave policy studies about China, and by positioning itself as interdisciplinary research, it bridges social science with humanities. The discourse analysis of this research and its emphasis on the role of language in interpreting reality reveals the interconnectivity between policy and culture retrospectively."