The plan was unveiled Thursday following high-level, closed-door political meetings this week in Beijing. The terse announcement from Xinhua, the state news agency, about the sharp shift in family planning policy gave no details. With oversight down to the smallest of communities, the party could enforce its will with threats of severe punishment. “The increase is not likely to be large, though”, says Adrian Raftery, a population statistician at the University of Washington in Seattle.
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The declining birth rate means that the nation will have a smaller and smaller population from which to draw workers.
“Having a second child wasn’t allowed, so we had to work on them and persuade them to have an abortion”, he said. But in an effort to make it so the current generation isn’t too sparse, families all throughout the country may now have two children. “Couples that have two children could still be subjected to coercive and intrusive forms of contraception, and even forced abortions-which amount to torture”, William Nee, a China researcher at Amnesty worldwide, stated in the news release. Now couples everywhere will be allowed to have a second child. However, few of these eligible couples made a decision to have two kids, as they were concerned about the expense and pressure of raising them in the very competitive Chinese society. Families could have two if one parent was an only child.
The rule also changed what many Chinese children considered to be their siblings, as sociologist Vanessa Fong of Amherst College in Massachusetts found out.
“Relatively speaking, people in rural farming villages may be more interested”, Jiang added. A total of 800 million of them are employed. But that job market population is expected to drop by 2050. Thursday’s move, which follows months of speculation according to the Guardian, comes after a previous effort failed to raise the number of births by 2 million each year.
WTHITV.com provides commenting to allow for constructive discussion on the stories we cover. George Grow was the editor.
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China’s fertility rate is now around 1.4 children per woman, which is drastically lower than other developed nations, The Washington Post notes.
