Navigating “fear of childbirth” on and off digital platforms: Market rationality and the localization of neoliberal feminism in China

Abstract

The fear of childbirth (FOC) discourse on digital platforms is a pervasive yet understudied gender belief shaping contemporary gender dynamics in China. This study focuses on young Chinese urban middle-class women, who are active Red (Xiaohongshu) users at various marital and childbearing stages. Using critical discourse analysis of 187 FOC posts and in-depth interviews with 13 users, this study analyzes how market rationality shapes FOC discursively and in practice. Drawing on a life-course-informed, stage-comparative design (unmarried without children, married without children, married with children), it investigates how Red users construct FOC discourse and the gender strategies they adopt to navigate intimate relationships. The findings suggest that market rationality, embedded in neoliberal feminism circulating online, plays a key role in shaping women's FOC. While Western neoliberal feminist discourse promotes a “having it all” ideal that links self-optimization to simultaneous career and family success, evidence from urban China reveals a different articulation: life-stage self-optimization. Within a state–market–family nexus that reinforces women's reproductive roles, many women reframe reproduction as a high-cost decision, strategically avoiding, bargaining, or externalizing it to optimize work and life across the life course. Platform cultures further intensify this cost–benefit logic to devalue reproduction and reinforce FOC. The study shows how FOC discourse constitutes a localized articulation of Western neoliberal feminism in China that reconfigures the “having it all” script, with market rationality shaping women's reproductive decision-making and becoming embedded in their everyday lives.