The party’s Central Committee said in a statement that the decision was “to improve the balanced development of population” and to deal with an aging population.
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But on the Internet, the announcement triggered a tsunami of snarky comments.
“I am pleased at being given a choice for us to decide whether we would like to have a child or not”. And they’re hopeful the new approach will change the curve.
Parents who violated the one-child rule were often denied access to public services, Richardson said, and the same will happen to those who have more than two children. For starters, there’s no guarantee the Chinese will start having more kids. Five years later, Liang, a population scholar at the Shanxi Academy of Social Sciences, wrote a letter to Hu Yaobang, then the party’s general secretary, arguing that if families were allowed to have two children, the population could still be kept to 1.2 billion by 2000.
The policy has been under quiet review for years.
“Modern population policy really goes back a century before this awful Chinese experiment”, says Eberstadt.
This message was reinforced by the United Nations, World Bank and other Western proponents of population control in developing nations.
“What drives China’s future the next two or three decades, it is not the population, Fred Hu, the founder of a Chinese investment firm, told the New York Times”.
“Population control was made part of the political legitimacy, to reduce the number of people, and to increase the output, therefore to increase the per capita income”.
Chinese women will remain at risk of intrusive forms of contraception and coerced or forced abortions, despite the authorities announcing a change to the country’s decades-long one-child policy, Amnesty global said today. Beijing hopes it can help offset the burden of an ageing population. “That the state does these very invasive things is not something that is seen as an extreme measure by many officials”, she said. “I couldn’t bear it anymore and resigned from the family-planning team”.
Many liberal Chinese now see government efforts to design family and social structures as sheer folly and hubris. A few are influenced by the writings of the late Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek, who called such government intervention “fatal conceit”.
“This most ambitious of all social policies ever undertaken”, he adds, “can be expected to lead to the most massive unintended consequences of any social policy of all time”.
China said Thursday it would allow all married couples to have two children, signaling the end after 35 years to its drastic and unpopular “one-child” policy that has been blamed for skewing the gender balance, forcing women into unwanted abortions and bringing about a rapidly aging workforce.
They tore down the dwelling, destroyed the furniture and ruined the food, “making the house vanish in just 20 minutes”, the man said.
Beijing’s communist leaders announced this week that the end of the one-child policy, first put in place by Deng Xiaoping in the 1970s, will address a critical demographic imbalance: too many males and elderly. The one-child restriction also was harshly enforced in many areas, leading to forced abortions and sterilizations of women who had a second or third unauthorized child, according to activists. NPR’s Anthony Kuhn has this report from Beijing. Su Weihua, 36, of Guangzhou, who has an 8-year-old daughter and wants to have a second child. But on the Internet, it’s unleashed a tsunami of snark. One imaginary propaganda poster, done in a 1960s Maoist style, warns citizens – if you refuse to have more children, we’ll artificially inseminate your whole village. It’s, you know, it’s just so cynical.
It’s also unclear how the new policy will affect the day-to-day lives of Chinese families.
“I think that’s one of the tougher ones to carry out, given vested interests”.
Kaplowitz predicted that an increase in babies will eventually provide a “whole new base of opportunity” for US and other consumer products companies. “And people in all levels of government receive kickbacks and benefits from their participation in it”.
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The government loosened the one-child policy in November 2013, allowing couples to have a second child if either spouse is an only child. To help foreign audiences appreciate this Soviet-style blueprint, state media packaged it as a viral Internet video.
