After decades of a strict one-child policy, the ruling Communist Party said on Thursday that China will allow all families the freedom to have two children. He said in a statement Thursday that the two-child policy has not fundamentally changed China’s mandatory population control policy.
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Xinhua News Agency, the state-run news source in China, announced the policy change. After the policy was first implemented, rural couples were soon allowed two children if their first-born was a girl.
He has said the move was foreshadowed by a change in the propaganda: While old advertisements depicted parents doting on one child, he said, a recent commercial showed a boy begrudgingly sharing a toy with his younger sister.
The population of people of a working age fell in 2012, suggesting China could be the first country in the world to be old before it gets rich.
The restrictions had also led to an imbalanced sex ratio because of a traditional preference for boys, and draconian enforcement that sometimes included forced abortions. That’s because many young people in China are already struggling to make ends meet in crowded cities, taking care of their one child, and aging parents.
Frank Zhang, a government official, said he and his wife have longed for a second child for their two-year-old son to grow up with, but his job made it all but impossible to circumvent China’s official policy.
Critics said the relaxation of rules was too little, and too late to redress substantial negative effects of the one-child policy on the economy and society.
The one-child policy was introduced in 1979 as Beijing sought to stem a rapidly growing population, and officials still claim it has been a major factor behind the country’s growing prosperity.
“…For many organizations, the chief concern is linked to the news that couples would now have a limit of two children”. The abandonment of the policy is being seen as “great news”, according to Wang Feng at the University of California at Irvine, who is an expert on Chinese affairs.
To cope with that demographic decline, Mosher says, the Beijing government will move quickly from allowing couples to have a 2nd child to requiring larger families.
The commission said that 1.39 million eligible couples had obtained permits to have a second child as of the end of May, fewer than the 2 million it had estimated.
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The site’s users were far more interested in celebrity actress Angelababy, who held the number one spot, than making their own.
