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Chinese child care is the adults going to work and the older generation (the grandparents) take care of the child.

Or sometimes my mother brought me to her workplace and I just sat there playing a video game on the portable dvd player thing with the games loaded on a dvd (or a cd, idk the difference) and with controllers attached to it. (She worked at an electronics store as a salesperson).

My parents were in an arranged marriage (the consensual type, I think, but there was high pressures to enter into a marriage), and they argue a lot.

When we first immigrated to the US, my maternal grandparents weren't part of the "immediate" family, so they weren't allowed on the immigration visa, my paternal side of the family (who are already in the US) didn't like the responsibility of taking care of us (unlike my maternal side of the family), so my older brother who was around age 13-15 at the time when we first arrived, had to pick me up from school, and he resented having this responsibility, my brother didn't really like me, we were frienemies (now, present day, actual enemies).

But eventually, like around 6th grade I just walked home by myself. Most of the time, the house was empty (other than my brother). I barely talked with my parents, never had real emotional connections with them.

Childcare in China isn't that different from the US. (Well... in the US, kids get like a small child credit in their parent's tax returns, and some food stamps, but that's about it) The lower class is really very similar regardless of country. We the lower class people have more in common with each other than we do with the rich that runs our respective countries.

(If you are confused at the "Older Brother" part, my mother "illegally" gave birth to me. Then they sterilized her to make sure she can't violate the one child policy again. I was literally not even supposed to be born.)

other systemic problems like no access to child care facilities, a culture that doesn’t value women and people exhausted by long work days? I might have read that this is part of the root cause in korea.

I dare say that that's probably not the cause why women today want to have no or fewer children.

I suspect it's more about economic factors, such as the prospect of having a stable job for the next 40 years, and the prospect of stability that this brings. Society changes so rapidly that it would be absurd to think that people are still gonna have well-paying jobs in 40 years. We're already seeing a Cost-of-Living crisis today, or rather, a crisis of jobs not paying a living wage. That's only gonna get more severe over time.

Compare that to other cultures around the world (consider developing countries such as rural africa was 30+ years ago, and medieval europe). They had rough lifes and often didn't value women. But they had Stability: They could be reasonably certain that their living conditions should be roughly the same in 40+ years from now, so they can have some children. If they can feed them today, the children will be able to feed themselves in 40 years. Because society was static like that.

I cant speak about all of China, but of the 6 cities Ive been to, each had far more accessible child-care-related facilities than the US, from schools within walking distance of tower blocks to more parks and infrastructure/personnel to help kids get there without crossing busy roads, to massive libraries with play places, movie theaters, family restaurants, to tiny amusement parks.

This reflects a typical right wing approach to "increasing birthrates": Reinforcing """"traditional family values"""", vilifying defiance of gender norms and addressing anything but the root cause.

Overall the Chinese are somewhat known for pragmatic approaches, why chasing illusions in this case? The total number of readers and writers can't be that huge can't it?

Probably enlightened despotism giving way to regular despotism. Facing economic problems, and having shed all pretense of being socialist, the Chinese ruling class likely needs a scapegoat for the country's troubles.

Maybe still effects of the one-child-policy times. It's probably much easier to punish people for having too many children than it is to incentivise having more.