“The state has no business regulating how many children people have”.
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The relaxation of the family planning policy will probably lead to a higher birth rate in China, but how much higher than the current 1.2 percent is uncertain as birth rates in its East Asian neighbors are also very low, said UBS China economist Wang Tao.
Others said that the announcement didn’t go far enough, and called on the government to totally abandon its population control policies.
“I told the official in charge, ‘This is too ruthless.’ He replied: ‘It’s policy, ‘ ” the former team member said. Less than ten percent of the 11m eligible couples applied for an exemption. “We would have been fired from our jobs and our houses would have been torn down if we had dared to violate the one-child policy”. Officially, between 60 per cent and 70 per cent of rural families get permission to have a second child (compared with 10 per cent of urban families). If the one-child policy were to continue, it would start shrinking in 2029. In 2012, the blind “barefoot lawyer” fled to the U.S. Embassy in Beijing and is now a visiting fellow at the Catholic University of America. “The gender ratio is a result of the policy”, Liang said. “But they’re really just pushing back the limits a little bit”.
The announcement, made on Thursday by the State run news agency Xinhua News, comes after decades of vocal criticism, both outside of the country and within, of the party’s coercive birth-control policy.
And despite acknowledging the financial strain, more than anything they wish to have a sibling for their son, three-year-old Chen Xiangru. These efforts should not be allowed to stagnate; rather, they should be revived. “And people in all levels of government receive kickbacks and benefits from their participation in it”.
As well as being unnecessary, the policy has become unpopular because of the heavy-handed actions of a few local family-planning politicians who, either through force or corruption, brought the implementation of the policy into ill repute.
“Instituting a two-child policy”, she said in a statement to Aleteia, “will not end forced abortion in China”.
“From the demographic point of view, I think because the aging of the population, China is forced to turn to [a] two-child policy; but from the perspective of human rights, a child or two children does not matter, because mandatory abortion is a form of torture, and the two-child policy does not end the problem”, Littlejohn said. And yet, of the 623 children officially orphaned by the quake, all but a handful were still waiting in “welfare homes” a year later, even though the government had agreed to a generous monthly stipend for the orphans, and to waive penalties for couples who adopted them and subsequently had a child of their own.
China’s decision to abolish its one-child policy is a boon to couples and to sellers of goods from formula to diapers to toys.
Although the Chinese government has eased its restrictions on childbirth, Mosher notes, the policy change is “not because senior Party officials have suddenly developed a conscience”. This will impose a substantial economic burden on society and does not bode well for an economy already struggling to sustain strong growth.
But it met a “lukewarm response”, said Joan Kaufman, director of the Columbia Global Centers East Asia and a long-time expert on China’s population planning.
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In his early years as China’s leader, Mao Zedong was actually in favor of people having lots of babies, to provide soldiers for its army and workers for its factory.
