A growing gender imbalance within China was thought to have been caused by the one-child policy.
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For the past 36 years, China has been implementing one of the most controversial laws in the world to fight overpopulation… but the rule was officially abolished early Thursday morning. Starting in 2013, couples in which only one was a parent were allowed to have a child together.
China has been assessing the adjustment made to the one-child policy – allowing parents to have two children if either parent is an only child – to decide if further adjustment of birth policies are needed to address change in population growth.
If population policies in China boost child births from 15 million to 23 million for the next 20 years then the China would have 160 million more working age people in 2050.
Fully lifting the child restriction policies now might get the additional 5 million births to reach replacement level.
Mainland China announced the end of its hugely controversial one-child policy on Thursday, after decades of strict, sometimes brutal enforcement left it with an aging population and shrinking workforce, heightening the challenges of slowing growth.
There were no immediate details on the new policy or a timeframe for implementation.
China’s population is aging rapidly and the extra gray hairs have put huge stress on the world’s second-largest economy over the past three decades.
In fact, demographers say that the changes in policy this year have all been too little too late. Another story promoting the policy change was full of cute baby pictures, twins and happy families. Families whose first child suffered from a disability (or, in a few provinces, was simply a girl) were also allowed to have a second child.
“My aunts, uncles, cousins, my pregnant younger sister, my in-laws, they were all taken to the family planning office”, one woman who was pregnant at the time said.
Many couples who were allowed to have another child under the 2013 rules decided not to, especially in the cities, citing the cost of bringing up children in an increasingly expensive country.
State media said in January that about 30,000 families in Beijing, just 6.7 percent of those eligible, applied to have a second child.
“I can’t even afford to raise one, let alone two”, wrote one user. Human rights organizations welcomed the change to the deeply unpopular policy, but expressed reservations about remaining controls.
Others were more upbeat in support of the policy shift.
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The meeting reiterated the CCP’s goal to double 2010 GDP by 2020, as part of its aim to achieve a “moderately prosperous society” by the 100th anniversary of its founding. It said it would accelerate implementation of free-trade zones, and intervene less in the pricing of goods and services. The following year, the government projected the population would reach 1.2 billion by 2000, at which point the country would achieve its target of zero population growth.
