The ruling Communist Party decided Thursday at its annual meeting to finally abolish its decades-long one-child policy.
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The Chinese government has already eased a few restrictions in what has often been described as the “one-child policy”, and a party conference in 2013 approved allowing couples to have two children when one of the spouses was an only child.
1970: Chinese population exceeds 800 million. The State Council, China’s Cabinet, mandates sharp reductions in population growth rates throughout the 1970s.
Wang Feng, an academic and expert on demographic and social change in China, called the new two child policy an “historic event” but said the challenges of China’s aging society still remain.
China is revoking its 35-year policy of having one child per family to two children per family, a policy that was enforced in the 1970s to prevent over population.
In Beijing alone, more than 53,000 couples had applied for the right to have a second child after the capital city altered its birth control policy early a year ago, Xinhua said.
The 2013 reform permitted Chinese couples in which one parent is an only child to have a second child. After a long, gradual relaxing of the policy, the government will now allow families to have two children.
Here are charts showing statistics and projections that may have pushed Communist Party leaders toward the change as they met in Beijing this week to hash out an economic framework for the next five years. Activists have campaigned against the policy in recent years amid fears that country’s aging population will leave huge gaps in the workforce. It is believed that it also contributed to China’s current gender imbalance, as male children are generally seen as more desirable, resulting in female infanticide.
The new plan, it seems, is to counteract the old-as-hell population with an influx of babies before the entire labor force ends up in a retirement home.
“If you take the one child per family through two generations, the younger generation has no aunts, uncles, or cousins”, Bush explains.
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It’s also estimated China’s elderly population will make up 25 percent of China’s total population (currently the world’s largest total at 1.3 billion) by 2050.
