The one-child policy is dead, long live the two-child policy. After decades of strict control of the number of children people can have, China has opened up its family planning system to allow most couples to have two children. No one though is expecting a baby boom. Despite the relaxation of the rules, there are still fines for married couples who have more than two children and single women are forbidden from having children.
China is saddled with the world’s lowest fertility rate and faces an uncertain future, with too many old people, too few youngsters to care for them and a potentially debilitating labour shortage. Now there are calls to free up the complex web of regulations to help ease demographic pressures and better reflect the changing nature of Chinese society.
A Nuo, a 35-year-old therapist, already has a daughter and is planning to have a second child but insists it is very much her own decision to do this. “The two-child policy doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. The right to have children is a private right, it’s not important if there is a policy or not.”
A common complaint is that parents are themselves treated like children by the authorities and citizens can be told to do whatever the government wants.
“Nobody is stupid and people have to make their own decisions whether to have a second child and how to raise them, so I don’t think the policy means much to most families,” says A. “At least for urban families, if they choose to have a second child, there is a smaller penalty fee to pay now.”
For those living rural areas, this policy has a less significant impact, she says, because they can already give birth to a second child, to three children or even four. “Whether to have more children depends on the financial situation of a family and the ability to raise them. My husband and I plan to have a second child, but we make this decision considering the whole family’s situation, not a decision blindly made based on public policy,” she says.
Indeed, the one-child policy may have been too effective. More than two-fifths of Chinese parents are not interested in having a second child. Some experts believe the country’s population, currently at 1.3 billion, may dip below one billion by the end of the century. The government is trying to encourage women to have more children, although it baulks at politically charged decisions such as allowing single women to have a child outside of a relationship – something that 87 per cent of people in a survey said they supported.
Feng Yuan, a women's activist who has been involved in feminist issues in China since the 1980s, believes that introducing the two-child policy will help some to realise their ambitions to have more than one baby.
“However, some women may face a tougher situation. They may face big pressure from their parents-in-law to have two babies, whereas before, the one-child policy may have acted as a buffer to this kind of pressure,” she says. “Also, it may be tougher when women apply for a job, if they are ‘marriageable age’ and have no child yet, because the employer may calculate how much work she will miss through two maternity leaves and decline her application.”
Many are calling for social maintenance fees, as the charges for having extra children are called, to be abolished nationwide and for single women to be given access to in vitro fertilisation. “There is a voice for single women’s right to have babies. You can see some lesbians trying to have their own babies, and some unmarried women do the same thing, also, but in reality, these cases are still not very common, as there are many obstacles to be overcome,” Feng adds.
“Some women will opt to have more children, many will not. There are more and more young women who don’t want to have any children.”
On average, Chinese women have 1.05 children, making the country's total fertility rate the lowest in the world – self-ruled Taiwan was second-lowest, with 1.18, Hong Kong the world's third lowest, with 1.20 and Singapore fourth-lowest, with 1.24.
“These areas are all areas of the Chinese cultural circle,” says Yi Fuxian, a scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who has long been critical of China’s family planning policy. Since 2000, Yi has called on the Chinese government to abandon the population control policy. The fertility rate naturally declines as the socio-economic level increases, so no population control policy was necessary, he argues.
While the government insists that the one-child policy, introduced in stages around the late 1970s, was necessary to stop the population from growing out of control, Yi argues that had it been scrapped completely in 1980, China’s population would have peaked at a maximum of fewer than 1.6 billion.
China’s population will drop to 1.1 billion in 2050, 720 million in 2075 and 450 million in 2100, Yi forecasts. The decline in population will be accompanied by an ageing population structure and innovation will be undermined.
“China’s economic vitality will continue to decline,” he adds. “Chinese leaders should also recognise the population is both shrinking and ageing very rapidly. I think the whole policy will be abandoned completely in two years.”
There are signs the government recognises the need for more fundamental changes in family planning policy. This year's Green Book of Population and Labour said the approach to raising the birth rate may need "adjustment", while Zhang Chewei, director of the Institute of Population and Labour, has spoken of a reduced willingness to give birth and the increased ages of eligible women.
President Xi Jinping mentioned ageing as one of the challenges facing the world at the G20 summit.
For decades now, China’s economy has developed to cater mostly to one-child families. Housing, education and other costs are often high, based partly on the expectation a couple will have only one child.
“China’s government should reform economic and social policies: lower housing costs, lower population density in cities, more social services for children and lower child-raising costs,” says Yi.
Li Xuan, assistant professor of psychology at New York University Shanghai, believes the lack of subsidies for childcare and support for women in the workplace is a major issue. "I'm not sure how the population would respond to this. I can't speak for the rural population, but at least among the urban females I don't see a lot of enthusiasm or seeing it as a source of freedom, but rather seeing that policy as a new source of oppression," says Li.
Third article in a series of four. Tomorrow: China’s feminists fight to make their voices heard
