Sheep-year babies: the belief and the figures

What the belief says

The old saying is 十羊九不全 (shí yáng jiǔ bù quán), roughly “nine in ten sheep are not whole”: a marriage, a career or a life that doesn't come out complete (The World of Chinese). In 2014 a Zhejiang newspaper quoted elders in Shaoxing as saying a son born in a Sheep year is passable, but a daughter has a hard life (Qianjiang Evening News, in Chinese). AFP summed it up as a belief, still held by some, that most people born in the year are unhappy in life (The Star).

A cultural scholar told Xinhua in 2015 that these sayings spread by repetition and have no scientific basis. He also pointed out that 羊 sits inside the characters for beautiful (美), kind (善) and auspicious (祥) (Xinhua, in Chinese).

China's 2015 births

In January 2016, China reported 16.55 million births for 2015, 320,000 fewer than in 2014. An official at China's family-planning commission attributed the fall partly to the Year of the Sheep, and also to about five million fewer women of childbearing age (AFP in The Star).

China Daily, a state-run paper, replied in an editorial that the explanation “sounds farfetched rather than a sincere attempt” to face the country's demographic challenges (AFP in The Star), and called it a “creative use of superstition” (NPR via Texas Public Radio). The Beijing Times said official statistics pointed to fewer women of childbearing age, not to zodiac signs (same report).

Before the Sheep year began, a demographer told The Washington Post that zodiac birth booms are a factor on a smaller scale, but that on a national scale there doesn't seem to be any discernible effect, and that the zodiac is one ingredient among many (reported in The World of Chinese, January 2015).

What these figures can't settle

The count is for the calendar year. The Sheep year ran from 19 February 2015 to 7 February 2016, so the 2015 figure includes seven weeks of Horse-year births and misses the Sheep year's last five weeks.

Births rose to 17.86 million in 2016, in part thanks to the two-child policy that began that year (CGTN). 2016 was also a Monkey year for all but its first five weeks. The policy and the zodiac changed together, so these years can't separate them. Fewer women of childbearing age pull the count down whatever the year's animal.

These are the figures as first reported. Later tables can show different numbers for the same years (Wikipedia's table).

A clearer case: Japan's Fire Horse

The best-known case of a birth-year belief showing in national figures is Japan in 1966, a Fire Horse year: 1,360,974 births, against 1,823,697 in 1965 and 1,935,647 in 1967, the last Fire Goat year (ministry figures, via ISVD). A Japanese sociologist attributes the dip to couples deliberately shifting their timing (Nippon.com).

So a belief can move births. That says nothing about the children born, and none of the sources on this page offers evidence that a child's life goes worse for being born in a Sheep year. For what happened in 2026, see the Year of the Fire Horse.

What this page isn't

This site doesn't read a child's future from a birth year, and it doesn't suggest a year, a month or a day for a birth. A birth-year animal is one character of eight in a BaZi chart. The other seven are traditional readings too, and this site doesn't suggest timing a birth for any of them. The dates and who counts as a Goat ›