This marks a major relaxation of Chinese population control policies and allows greater freedom for Chinese families.
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“We as China Partner want to continue to drive home the importance, as pastors and as Christian leaders, of how we can be salt and light in the Chinese community in the area of marriage and family”, Burklin explains. Top-level Chinese officials and economists have been debating whether or not 7 percent GDP growth should be considered the “New Normal” for Chinese economic development. More can be done, but right now this can lead the country in a better direction.
China’s family planning policy was instituted in the late 1970s, restricted most couples to only a single offspring.
According to The Guardian, China has a population of 1.3 billion people, and it is forecasted that by 2050, 440 million of those people would be over 60 years old.
However, due to a propensity for the Chinese population to prefer male births, the policy indirectly promoted a large gender imbalance.
What does he think is more important that the number of babies born in China? Hong Kong commentator Joseph Lian Yi-zheng also comments in his column for Hong Kong Economic Journal that the policies on reproduction reminds him of Nazi Germany, where women’s self-determination was denied and biological role as childbearers was targeted. Consequently, as the Wall Street Journal noted, “many countries will have to face additional public spending of more than 5 per cent of gross domestic product” for healthcare, old-age support and long-term care programmes.
It is unclear how the people of China will respond to this emancipation but one thing is certain, changes have come.
The exercise in demographic misanthropy over a 35-year period is also contributing to a disfigurement of China’s population composition, of a character unlike that seen anywhere else in the world.
Only time will tell whether or not the economic and social performance accompanied by the policy will outweigh the potential negative consequences.
In the same time frame, the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) has received more than $227 million from the USA government and has worked alongside the Chinese government while it carried out egregious violations of women’s right to bear children.
The negative impacts of China’s decreased labor pool will likely cost billions.
And now there is the challenge of persuading people who have been indoctrinated against children – and equated them with totalitarian brutality and financial hardship – to have more kids.
“This really marks a historic point to end one of the most controversial and costly policies in human history”, Wang Feng said. Once more, China must deal with the institutional problems. For example, human trafficking syndicates will not immediately dissipate after the change in policy is implemented.
The new rules were announced last month as the Communist Party seeks to address a plunging fertility rate and a shrinking labour force, and an increase in the number of elderly. After more than 35 years of one of the world’s most radical experiments in social engineering, Shanghai’s fertility rates have plunged to low levels according to nytimes.com article “The long shadow of China’s one-child policy” by Brook Larmer. Although there are still limitations on the amount of children citizens can have, it’s a step in the right direction.
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The Chinese government has chose to abandon its decades-old one-child policy, the state-run Xinhua News Agency reported at the end of October. Statistics show that urban fertility began to diverge from national trends (table 1.1); however, the impact of the one-child policy is not clear-cut.
