CHINA INTENDS to stick to the One Child Policy in the coming decades despite concerns about the policy’s problematic side effects, such as too few girls being born and a greying population.
The policy was imposed in 1979 as a way of slowing population growth, already running at perilously high levels in the world’s most populous nation. Moreover, it restricted most families to one child.
There have been various reports that China planned to relax the system amid worries that it was creating a demographic time bomb that the country would struggle to contain in the next generation. But the head of the National Population and Family Planning Commission said the plan would stay intact.
“Historical change doesn’t come easily, and I, on behalf of the National Population and Family Planning Commission, extend profound gratitude to all, the people in particular, for their support of the national course,” Ms Li said in the China Daily newspaper. “So we will stick to the family-planning policy in the coming decades.”
The policy was introduced 30 years ago in the post-Mao Zedong era in China and its aim was to reduce fertility levels to 1.7 children per family, because this was seen as the only way of improving living standards. At first, couples were encouraged by education programmes and propaganda to have one child but this soon gave way to much tougher measures, and the early 1980s saw widespread sterilisation, especially among women in the countryside.
China says the plan has prevented 400 million additional births and helped people out of poverty.
However, demographic experts say the expanding elderly population will be increasingly hard to support as the young labour force begins to contract in coming decades.
China’s working population will fall by about 10 million every year after 2025, and the number of young people between 20 and 24 will drop by one-quarter over the next decade.
The policy has also resulted in a distorted sex ratio, as people abort girls and keep trying for boys.
The male-female ratio at birth in China is about 119 males to 100 females, with the gap as high as 130 boys for every 100 girls in some provinces. In most of the west the ratio is 107 to 100.
Some high-profile figures have been making comments lately about the policy. The director of Guangdong province’s family planning commission, Zhang Feng, said at the weekend he expected the policy in the province would ease after the national five-year plan is complete, or around 2015.
"I predict if population control remains on course and meets its targets, Guangdong is likely to let couples – in which one of the two parents is an only child – to have a second child," he said in an interview with the Yangcheng Evening News. "And after 2030, any Guangdong couple could have a second child. That's just my personal view."
In practice there has been some rolling back of the legislation, such as experiments in financial centre Shanghai and the capital Beijing.These may be expanded in the provinces of Heilongjiang, Jilin, Liaoning, Zhejiang and Jiangsu.