“The state has no business regulating how many children people have”. “Without tens of thousands of yuan, is it enough?”
Advertisement
The decision allowing all married couples to have two children reflects the Chinese government’s concern over an ageing population and shrinking workforce, pressures weighing on an already flagging economy.
“One of the main puzzles of modern population and social history is why, among all countries confronting rapid population growth in the second half of the twentieth century, China chose to adopt an extreme measure of birth control known as the one-child policy”.
In a major change to family-planning legislation, the ruling Communist Party of China (CPC) yesterday announced it was abolishing the one-child policy. Its advocates will argue it reduced the world’s population by hundreds of millions, alleviating poverty and lessening the strain on the environment.
“This is why we are concerned that the National Family Planning Board (NFPB), created by the Jamaican Government in 1967, appears to be low on funding, as was revealed by executives in Wednesday’s Editors” Forum hosted by this newspaper. She is 20 years old.
In altering the one-child policy, the Chinese authorities bowed to reality without openly acknowledging their failure, either practical or moral.
Families with young children gather outside a paediatric hospital in central Beijing.
“While the change is a positive step, nobody would see this as real respect for reproductive freedom”, she said.
Heavy financial penalties are levied on unauthorised births, while education and employment opportunities are severely curtailed for undocumented children unable to obtain identification and household registration documents.
Because of the widespread practice of sex selective abortion, “there are an estimated 37 million Chinese men who will never marry because their future wives were terminated before they were born”, the anti-Communism site noted, citing figures from a 2009 British Medical Journal study. As a father, I very much would like to have a second child, so does my wife.
China’s population is expected to reach 1.45 billion by 2030 following its move to scrap the three-decades-old one-child policy and permit all couples to have a second child, a senior official said. After about 35 years, the policy is said to have prevented a few 400 million births, and has caused gender imbalance and a receding labor population.
But the uptake has been lukewarm.
Wealthier and more educated than their parents, Chinese couples now weigh up the cost of raising a second child, the time and effort required to ensure they are accepted into a good school and the extra care that will be needed at home if both decide to return to work.
Jeremy Lee Wallace, an associate professor at Cornell University’s government department, says the change was a “boon” for human rights but would not radically affect demographic trends. The macro picture around China shows a declining birth rate – particularly in Shanghai, which is wealthier than other parts of China and a potential sign of where the rest of China is heading as it gets wealthier. And, since 2013, couples who are the product of the one-child policy have been allowed to double-up with offspring.
Advertisement
“People won’t have a second child if the burden is too great, so there really needs to be more state help”, He said as he strolled with his child outside Beijing’s Capital Institute of Pediatrics.
