Changes to China’s One-Child Policy
Recently, the Chinese press and the blogosphere have been abuzz about expected changes to the one-child policy. The issue has become all the more pressing since China’s fertility rate has dropped to a deeply worrying 1.7, well below the population replacement level of 2.1. However, experts suggest that changes are likely to be incremental and introduced regionally in selected pilot projects.
Putting aside draconian measures resorted to in some regions to enforce existing laws, the one-child policy has led to some wacky rules, especially in the major cities. In Beijing, for example, although couples who are both single-children are allowed to bear a second child, they can be fined if a second child is given birth when the mother is less than 28 years-old or the second child is born within four years after the first. Wealthy couples can afford to pay the “social maintenance fee” fines but their ‘extra’ children cannot obtain ‘hukou’ or household registration and lose educational and health benefits.
Mr Zhang Weiqing, former head of the National Population and Family Planning Commission (NPFPC), said proposed changes would allow urban women to have a second child, even if one of the parents is not an only child. A more relaxed policy also would mean that rural parents will be able to have two or more children.
A major report released by government think-tank the China Development Research Foundation (CDRF) last October recommended that policies be introduced in two stages. First, relaxing curbs in cities and rural areas that have followed existing policies to the letter; and second, by 2015, putting in place a ‘one and a half child’ policy under which if the first child is a girl, a second child would be allowed.
In an interview with Economic Reference News, Lu Mai, Secretary General of the CDRF, said his foundation discussed and modeled four scenarios for policy change: 1) selectively relaxing policies, 2) relaxing policies across the country, 3) selectively relaxing policies for families with one single-child parent, and 4) relaxing policies for one single-child parent families across the board.
The exercise found that the second scenario would result in an explosion of births over the short-term and the third and fourth scenarios would take too long to achieve desired results. Thus, selective relaxation of existing policy was deemed the best option considering the urgency of China’s demographic problems while seeking to prevent an acute Chinese-style ‘baby boom’.
Lu Jiehua, a demographer at Peking University and a member of the NPFPC, told the China Daily, “I think the government will take action next year and the chances are inevitable given the increasingly complicated population problems ranging from ageing to a massive migrant population, and the huge gender gap.” He also expected a universal two-child policy to be introduced eventually but over the next two decades, family planning will remain the domain of the government rather than individual families.
Low birth rates across the country have become severe. In Shanghai, most single-child parents refuse to procreate beyond a single child. Despite campaigns by the city’s family planning bureau to encourage second-child births, in 2010, Shanghai’s fertility rate had fallen to a dismal 0.77. A 2007 survey by the Population Institute of the Chinese Academy of Sciences revealed that in nearby Jiangsu Province, of the families that were eligible to have a second child, only 4.4% wanted one. Pilot projects in the countryside of inland provinces Shanxi, Gansu, Hebei and Hubei to allow two or more children indicated an overall fertility rate of only 1.6.
Hence, some experts are advocating the abandonment of the one-child policy altogether. Discounting the adverse effect of a sudden burst in babies, they say the trashing of the entire policy would not even augment fertility levels to above the replacement level. China’s population dividend is essentially over, they argue, leading to sharply rising labour costs and the end of China’s labour-intensive export- oriented development strategy. Zhang Erli, a former leading statistician at the NPFPC put it bluntly: “Relaxing population controls is no longer optional, it has become imperative and imminent”.
Moreover, China’s elderly population is heading on a steeply upward trajectory. Today, there are some 100 million elderly collecting old-age pensions as half of provincial social security accounts face deficits. By the mid 2030s, that number is expected to increase to 300+ million, placing inordinate pressures on China’s social security system. Thus, if appropriate reforms are not adopted fast enough, China may land in the same boat that Japan is in.