China announced on Wednesday that its population fell for the second year running, in part because of record low birthrates.

Nearly nine years after it abandoned its one-child policy, China’s population is both shrinking and aging, posing an economic challenge to its leaders. They have sought to address this by urging women to have more children even at the expense of education and careers, and that’s worrying feminists.

As China specialist Dr. Leta Hong Fincher told us in a 2022 interview, the Chinese Communist Party has long seen women’s growing educational attainment “as a kind of threat”, because they were less likely to marry early and have children.

Here is her interview, first published in October 2022.

This piece was published in partnership with The Atlantic and The Fuller Project.