Family planning controls to stay
Print Edition
CHINA will stick to family planning restrictions for up to 30 years, a senior official said yesterday, rejecting concerns that limits on the number of children had shrunk the pool of workers needed to support an aging population.
Last year, the ruling Communist Party announced the country would relax its long-standing one-child policy, allowing all couples to have two children.
Critics, however, have said that the policy change has come too late to avert a dangerous population imbalance as many couples are now not keen on having more children.
China’s population is set to peak at about 1.45 billion in 2050 when one in every three people is expected to be more than 60 years old, with a shrinking proportion of working adults to support them.
Officials, however, will adhere to family planning restrictions “for the long term,” Wang Pei’an, vice minister of the National Health and Family Planning Commission, told a news conference in Beijing.
“This long-term adherence is at least 20 years, 30 years,” Wang said.
“After a period of time, along with demographic changes, and along with changes in the population’s socio-economic development situation, we will adopt a different population policy.”
It is difficult to give a specific time on how long the restrictions on family size would be maintained, he said, adding that it is an issue that has to be dealt with “in line with the times.”
Asked about the danger that the two-child policy will prevent China from getting rich before it gets old, Wang said an aging population was a global problem and “an inevitable trend of a society’s development.”
China’s main problem with its labor force is not the number of workers but “how to improve the quality of workers,” he said.
There is a demographic “imbalance” across China, between poorer regions with higher fertility levels and cities, where many residents are reluctant to have more children, Wang told reporters.
The one-child policy was introduced in 1979 to prevent population growth spiraling out of control, but is now regarded as responsible for shrinking the labor pool.
It has also led to the problem of an aging society, with a smaller number of productive young people, a phenomenon usually seen in industrialized countries.
With the adoption of the two-child policy, China’s labor force could rise by more than 30 million by 2050 and its aging population will be reduced by 2 percentage points by 2030, Wang said.
According to the commission, 90 million Chinese women are allowed to have a second child under the new policy that took effect on January 1. Sixty percent of them are over 35 years old and 50 percent are aged 40 or older.
“The new policy has increased the likelihood of later-age pregnancies, which are associated with risks ... Therefore, we need better maternal and child health services,” Wang said.
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