A child is wrapped up against the cold at a park in Beijing, China, October 30, 2015.
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The most significant development from the meeting was a decision to roll back the decades-long one-child policy, and allow all couples to have two children.
But despite all the anguish of the one-child policy, small families are now the cultural norm – not just in mainland China but also among most ethnically Chinese populations across East Asia. Now, couples are allowed to have two children.
By seizing on the change in China’s population policy, Taiwan could become one of its beneficiaries.
In 2005, farmers in the city of Linyi told the Washington Post that local authorities raided the homes of families with two children and demanded that at least one parent be sterilized.
Critics said the relaxation of rules was too little, too late to redress substantial negative effects of the one-child policy on the economy and society.
Investors backed a bump in sales for companies with baby or child-related businesses after China’s Communist leaders announced that all married couples would be allowed to have two children.
Fei Fei, a retired teacher and artist, said the government should looking at the issue from the people’s viewpoint, because it is not necessary for everything to be decided by the government.
“The economy is now more uncertain, so that’s another thing we have to carefully consider”. “We are the lonely generation”, Shao said. China’s “one-child” family planning regime, which Beijing announced yesterday would end after almost four decades, has seen arbitrary and often brutal enforcement, including forced abortions and sterilisations.
Thus, an only child will have to take the sole responsibility of caring for his elderly and other members of the family. His 2-year-old needs substantial medical care, but government support varies widely, depending on where families live and their legal residency status. The 60-plus population now represents about a seventh of China’s people. She added that with the change in the policy, she is already too old to have a second child.
“The core of the policy”, says Littlejohn, “is that they’re telling people how many kids they can have and then enforcing that limit coercively with forced abortion, forced sterilization and forced contraception”.
“They’re still maintaining strict control on something that should be everyone’s right”. Still, the official end of the one-child policy has renewed her interest having another. Sometimes the second or third child was penalized and could not be registered, so he or she could not go to school.
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Social media users questioned whether one was truly the loneliest number and said that even if they wanted a child, they could not afford one. China says it has 576,000 orphans in its child welfare system though outside groups put the number at closer to a million. The plunging birthrate stands to increase the burden on the working-age population and create a labor shortage, said Chen, 34.
