Asia’s Billionaires Are Bankrolling a Push for More Babies
From Hong Kong to Seoul, tycoons are offering cash and perks to boost birth rates, testing whether private wealth can succeed where governments have struggled.
Illustration: Qianhui Yu for Bloomberg
Percy Lee and Gloria Kwok had penciled a child into a future that first involved finishing their dissertations and earning Ph.D.s in humanities at universities in Hong Kong. Instead, the baby came sooner. The couple found themselves juggling overnight feeds, studying and research, and a constant calculus of rent, stipends and child-care expenses.
They received a HK$20,000 ($2,550) newborn baby bonus from the Hong Kong government early this year and spent it almost immediately on a crib, stroller and diapers. Then another message landed in their inboxes, this one from a local tycoon’s philanthropic organization. Lee and Kwok were each gifted HK$50,000 from Trip.com Group Ltd.co-founder and Chairman James Liang’s Genovation Foundation, which gives childbearing subsidies to full-time Ph.D. students in the city. The cash paid for a sitter in the early weeks after the child’s birth and freed Kwok to go on a field trip for her research.