China prepares to ease one-child policy
Changes to China’s strict one-child policy means that millions of parents will be able to have a second child from early next year, according to state media.
The move marks the first comprehensive set of family planning reforms under President Xi Jinping who last month set out a five-year plan with a view to raising fertility rates and ease the financial burden on China’s rapidly ageing population.
“We will begin to allow couples to have two children if one of them is an only child,” a state document said then. “We will gradually change and perfect our family planning policy and boost the population to grow steadily in the long term.”
The policy change is expected to go into force in some areas of China in the first quarter of 2014, Yang Wenzhuang, a director at the National Health and Family Planning Commission, told the Xinhua news agency.
Numbers unclear
Beijing said last month it would allow millions of families to have two children, the most radical relaxation of its strict one-child policy in nearly three decades.
Authorities were in the process of calculating the number of eligible couples, Yang said. The National People’s Congress, is expected to formally approve the new policy later this week.
Controlled easing (with caveats)
Xinhua cited members of parliament debating the easing of the rules as saying that it was important the country continued to enforce family planning and that people who violate the rules were punished.
“China still has a large population. This has not changed. Many of our economic and social problems are rooted in this reality,” Xinhua quoted member of parliament Jiang Fan as saying. “We could not risk letting the population grow out of control.”
China, with nearly 1.4 billion people, is the world’s most populous country. The government says the policy of limiting families to one child, which covers 63 per cent of the population, has averted 400 million births since 1980.