China considering a 2-child policy
Couples currently restricted to one child under China’s family planning policy may be allowed a second child even before the policy is redrafted in 2015.
The new concession would apply to couples where only one spouse is a single child, according to insiders.
China is deliberating whether to further relax the country’s one-child policy, a spokesman confirmed yesterday.
Mao Qun’an, spokesman for the National Health and Family Planning Commission, was responding to media attention on China’s population policies, Xinhua news agency reported.
Mao reaffirmed that China must adhere to the basic state policy of family planning for a long period of time. He said that because the country’s basic conditions still include a huge population, weak economic foundations, sparse per capita resources and insufficient environmental capacity, the population will continue to put pressure on the economy, society, resources and the environment.
However, he said one of the commission’s major tasks lies in improving the family planning policy, Xinhua reported.
It is organizing surveys and studies on correlations between the size, quality, structure and distribution of China’s population, the news agency said.
To improve population policies, Mao said, China must maintain the current low birth rate while also taking into consideration the public’s needs, social and economic development, and changes in the population structure.
The family planning policy was first introduced in the late 1970s to rein in China’s surging population by limiting most urban couples to one child and most rural couples to two children, if the first was a girl.
Under the policy, most couples born in urban areas in the 1980s come from single-child families.
The policy was relaxed around 2007, allowing couples where both parents came from single-child families to give birth to two children.
A revised policy that would allow all couples to have two children is expected to be carried out in 2015, the 21st Century Business Herald reported yesterday.
The one-child policy has played a key role in curbing the rising Chinese population, but problems have begun to emerge. One hot topic is the rapid increase in China’s elderly population while birth rates remain low.
Demographers say loosening the one-child policy would normalize the ratio between males and females. Last year there were 16.35 million births in China which led to a sex ratio at birth of 117.7 boys for every 100 girls in 2012 while a normal ratio should be 103 to 107 boys for every 100 girls.
The number of people of working age in China, those between 15 and 59, decreased by 3.45 million to 937.27 million in 2012.
In comparison, there were 194 million people aged 60 or older in China last year, accounting for 14.3 percent of the total population.
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