China To Consider Changing One-Child Policy, Official Says

Main Category: Women's Health / Gynecology
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Article Date: 03 Mar 2008 - 7:00 PST

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China plans to examine how it might relax the country's one-child-per-family policy, Zhao Baige, vice minister of China's National Population and Family Planning Commission, said Thursday, the New York Times reports. According to Zhao, changes to the policy will come gradually and will not mean an eradication of population control policies altogether.

The one-child policy allows city residents to have one child and rural residents to have two. If both parents are only children or are members of ethnic minorities, they are granted exceptions to the law, according to the Times (Yardley, New York Times, 2/29). The policy seeks to keep the country's population, now 1.3 billion, at about 1.7 billion by 2050. However, the one-child policy has led to a gender imbalance in the country because of a preference for male children. According to government statistics, about 117 boys are born for every 100 girls born in China, compared with an average of 104 to 107 boys per 100 girls in industrialized countries (Daily Women's Health Policy Report, 8/27/07).

Zhao said surveys found that a majority of younger Chinese residents would like two children. She added that current plans will study only potential changes and that any adjustments will not lead to a rapid increase in China's birth rate (New York Times, 2/29). "We want incrementally to have this change," Zhao said, adding, "I cannot answer at what time or how, but this has become a big issue among decision makers" (Leow, Wall Street Journal, 2/29). According to Zhao, teams will study the strain of China's population on its resources, popular attitudes on the issue and how many services the country can afford to provide without the traditional reliance on large families to care for the elderly, Reuters reports (Hornby, Reuters, 2/28).

At the same time as the government is pledging to enact heavier fines on upper-class citizens willing to pay standard fines to have more children, some experts are warning that China's fertility rate is now extremely low. The experts also say that China is moving toward a demographic crisis with too many elderly people in need of expensive services and too few young workers paying taxes to meet those bills (New York Times, 2/29).

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