China decides to abolish 1-child policy, allow 2 children

[Jonathan Fairfield]

China decides to abolish 1-child policy, allow 2 children
LOUISE WATT, Associated Press

BEIJING (AP) — China's ruling Communist Party announced Thursday that the country will start allowing all couples to have two children, abolishing an unpopular policy that limited many urban couples to only one child for more than three decades.

The decision is the most significant easing of family-planning policies that were long considered some of the party's most onerous intrusions into family life and which the party had gradually been undoing in recent years. The restrictions had led to an imbalanced sex ratio because of a traditional preference for boys, and draconian enforcement that sometimes included forced abortions.

"You should be able to choose how many kids to have," real estate agent Zhang Linghui said in downtown Beijing in reaction to the news, adding that the policy change was a "sign of respect toward the people."

A communique from the party's Central Committee carried on the official Xinhua News Agency said that the decision to allow all couples to have two children was "to improve the balanced development of population" and to deal with an aging population.

The move may not spur a huge baby boom in part because fertility rates are believed to be declining even without the policy's enforcement. Previous easings of the one-child policy have spurred fewer births than expected, and many people among China's younger generations see smaller family sizes as ideal.

The communique followed the panel's meeting this week to chart the country's economic and social development through 2020. In recent years, it has been unusual for such plenary sessions to result in major decisions. They generally focus on economic topics and there was no indication that this one would take action on the one-child policy.

China, which has the world's largest population at 1.4 billion people, introduced the one-child policy in 1979 as a temporary measure to curb a then-surging population and limit the demands for water and other resources. Soon after it was implemented, rural couples were allowed two children if their firstborn was a girl. Ethnic minorities are also allowed more than one child.

Chinese families with a strong preference for boys have sometimes resorted to aborting female fetuses, a practice which has upset the ratio of male to female babies. The imbalance makes it difficult for some men to find wives, and is believed to fuel the trafficking of women as brides.

Couples who have broken the rules were forced to pay a fee in proportion to their income. In some cases, rural families saw their livelihood in the form of their pigs and chickens taken away.

In November 2013, the party announced that it would allow couples to have two children if one of the parents is a single child, the first substantial easing of the policy in nearly three decades.

The decision announced Thursday removes all remaining restrictions limiting couples to only one child.

The government credits the one-child policy with preventing 400 million births and helping lift countless families out of poverty by easing the strain on the country's limited resources. But many demographers argue the birthrate would have fallen anyway as China's economy developed and education levels rose.

Moreover, the abrupt fall in the birthrate has pushed up the average age of the population and demographers foresee a looming crisis because the policy reduced the young labor pool that must support the large baby boom generation as it retires.

"The good news is, it is here. The bad news is, it is too little too late," said Cai Yong, a sociology professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

"It's better late than never," said Willy Lam, an expert on Chinese politics at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. "It might serve to address the current imbalance in the sense that if they do not boost the growth rate then very soon, within 20 years or less, the working population will be supporting four aged parents."

-- (c) Associated Press 2015-10-29

[Seastallion]

Forgive me for being somewhat cynical, but I doubt this has anything to do with humanism, and everything to do with eventual expansionism.

[casualbiker]

Silly buggers will still have boys, just two of them!

[willyumiii]

I know four Chinese people very well, who tell me this is just western propaganda.

They are all teachers that I have worked with.

The Chinese government only limits the number of children in families that depend on government assistance for survival.

There is no limit for financially responsible families.

When I asked about Chinese parents killing the first born if it is female, they were shocked.

Our governments and their governments lie to us.

They want us to hate each other.

Since all four are female and come from families with at least three children, I believe them.

[casualbiker]

So how many brothers and sisters did they have?

[Jonathan Fairfield]

China’s one-child policy ‘to be scrapped’

China is to do away with its controversial one-child policy, according to state-run news agency Xinhua.

The ruling Communist Party (CPC) reportedly announced the decision to allow two children per couple at the end of a four-day summit to finalise its next five-year plan.

Introduced in 1979, the policy in the world’s most-populous country limited most couples to only a single offspring.

Authorities argued the subsequent economic boom was a result of the law. However, a rapidly ageing population, shrinking workforce and gender imbalances now suggest otherwise.

Limited exceptions to the policy were introduced in 2013, but China continued to suffer economically, with experts predicting it could be the first country ever to grow old before it becomes rich.

-- (c) Copyright Euronews 2015-10-30

[Publicus]

The one child policy has always --always-- applied primarily to the heavily populated and rapidly developing urban and metropolitan areas. The one child policy has never been absolute,nor has it ever applied to the entire country or to the entire population.

Populations in areas outside of the cities have always been allowed to have more than one child. The further one gets from a city, the more children a family has. This is a general rule and policy that has always applied; it is not an absolute practice or policy. There are suburban families with two children. There are rural families with several children. i have met them all, each and every kind of family with children.

In a city a family with money can "buy" a second child if they are willing and able to pay the government the fee/fine to have another child. Most however do not pursue this option.

It is btw too late for China demographically. As noted last week in the South China Morning Post in Hong Kong:

"The authorities expected 20 million new births in 2014, but only 16.9 million babies were born. By May this year, only 1.45 million couples -- out of 11 million eligible ones -- had applied to have a second child. "China had undergone a birth rate below the replacement level of 2.1 for 20 years straight."

There are already not enough young people to fill the labor market and there are not enough working in the economy to support the elderly population which is beginning to live longer.

The major negative consequence for the CCP reform program of the economy to a consumer based one, from infrastructure and exports, is that families continue to save, not spend. So many only child employees in the labor force have to support two parents and four grandparents the only child worker has to save mightily and spend only on the essentials that his elders need.

CCP Chinese teens whose parents have new money spend freely, however, once they enter the labor market they know they have to save, save, save. The CCP can only take its reforms to a consumer economy up to a certain level and point. Since 2012 consumption as a percentage of GDP has increased only to 39% from 34%, which is too slow a rate and too small an amount to be significant to CCP efforts to shift big project infrastructure GDP to household based consumption.

With the economy now tanking irreversably combined with a loss of confidence domestically and globally in the CCP Boyz, the CCP Chinese are saving even more and spending even less. Retail sales continue to grow but less and less each year with the trend moving toward the negative.

Worse, the ratio of girls to boys is 100:116. One consequence is that more couples are recently having girls rather than give birth to a boy who may not get the socio-economic discipline of having a wife and family. Virtually every county in the CCP China has numerous storefront walk-in family birth counselling centers where issues of gender are easily and quickly resolved at a token expense.

The bottom line in this demographic issue and in all of the command economy and society the CCP Boyz have been running is that both the economy and the society aren't following commands any more. The implications are not only clear, they are increasingly evident.

[williamgeorgeallen]

I know someone who works in china, he said he has seen the bodies of girls discarded at trash sites.

world population forcasted to double in the next 65 years at current rates. will try to put in a link to the graph https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/56/World-Population-1800-2100.svg

[NickJ]

They would have just started ordering out for brides..........

[Bludshoteyes]

It's modern economics and the same story in all developed nations: more children wanted to increase consumption & tax revenue, in order to revitalise flagging economies and pay for aging populations. These are ecomomic reasonings because we're not societies any more, we're economies. But when does it end? Growth can't go on indefinitely; resources are finite and our host planet is already overpopulated with a parasitic species. What about community? Sustainability? They don't get a look-in because it's all about money and maintaining the staus quo for the big-boys at the top of the food-chain.