Child policy eased, camp abolished
Print Edition
China’s top legislature formally approved a loosening of the country’s one-child policy and abolished its decades-long camp system yesterday.
The decisions were taken by the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress at the conclusion of a six-day meeting, according to Xinhua news agency.
The widening of existing exceptions to the one-child policy will allow couples where either parent has no siblings to have two children, reforming the strict family planning policy imposed more than three decades ago to prevent overpopulation. China is the world’s most populous nation with about 1.3 billion people.
The abolition of the system of re-education through labor, also known as “laojiao,” will see existing inmates freed.
“Their remaining terms will not be enforced any more,” it quoted the NPC resolution as saying.
China’s one-child policy has kept population growth in check and supported the country’s rapid development that has seen it soar from mass poverty to become the world’s second-largest economy.
But enforcement of the policy has at times been excessive. The public was outraged last year when photos circulated online of a woman forced to abort her baby seven months into her pregnancy.
Now China faces looming demographic challenges, including a rapidly increasing elderly population, a shrinking labor force and male-female imbalances.
China’s sex ratio has risen to 115 boys for every 100 girls, while the working population began to drop last year, Xinhua said earlier.
The birth rate has fallen since the 1990 well below the replacement rate, it added.
The easing of the one-child policy applies to around 10 million couples across the nation.
Provincial congresses and their standing committees will decide on implementing the new policy “based on evaluation of local demographic situation and in line with the law on population and family planning as well as this resolution,” Xinhua said, citing the resolution document.
The one-child policy reforms are expected to come into force in the first quarter of 2014, Xinhua reported recently, citing a senior official from the National Health and Family Planning Commission.
All those serving time in the labor camps will be set free, starting yesterday, but the penalties handed out before the abolition should still be considered legitimate, a provision aimed at preventing the victims from suing the state and seeking redress.
China began re-education through labor in 1957 as a speedy way to handle petty offenders.
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