With China preparing to usher in new leaders, the drumbeat of semi-official support for reform of the country’s controversial family planning policies continues to grow.
In the most recent development, a think tank affiliated with China’s State Council issued a report saying the country should start loosening one-child restrictions in areas where controls have been strictest as a prelude to eventually doing away with child limits altogether.
- Reuters
The report, produced by the China Development Research Foundation and highlighted by the state-run Xinhua news agency, points to China’s plummeting birth rate and numerous impending demographic imbalances in arguing that the one-child policy has outlived its usefulness, according to Xinhua.
China should have no need for birth planning after 2020, and should in fact begin encouraging families to have more children to avoid dangerously low fertility rates in the future, Xinhua quotes the report as saying.
Chinese family planning authorities credit the one-child policy with preventing around 400 million births, but concerns over the economic implications of China’s rapidly aging population, a widening gender imbalance and growing rights consciousness have led increasing numbers of academics and regular citizens to openly question the policy, which is sometimes enforced in brutal ways.
The CDRF report, which has yet to be made public, appears to largely mirror a call for relaxing the one-child rule made by members of the influential Development Research Center in June. The CDRF is an off-shoot of the Development Research Center.
“An opening up of the two-child option to all should be considered,” the Development Research Center members wrote at the time, noting that China could soon have too many retirees for its population of working-age people to support. “The longer we wait, the more vulnerable we will be.”
China has made moves in recent years to loosen the one-child restriction, including by allowing couples who are both only children to apply to have a second child. Rural couples whose first child is a girl and ethnic minority couples have long been allowed to have more than one child.
