Can China Escape the Damage Done by Its One Child Policy?

For one thing, the policy – implemented in 1980 to manage scarce resources – had been eased through the years as fertility had dropped, so that by 2013, a couple could have two children if one of them was an only child.

On October 29, the Communist Party of China announced that it would abolish its policy restricting families to have one child and enact a two-child policy instead. In short, Chinese families between 1950 and 1976 survived and reproduced within a paradoxical environment: the often repressive “egalitarianism” of communism permitted more Chinese parents and children than ever before to realise core ideals of traditional Chinese familism, while at the same time the revolution eliminated numerous original incentives for wanting to realise those ideals. He added that the labour force would increase by 30 million by 2050. As the Chinese population ages and leaves the workforce, the incoming youth will have difficulty supporting the elderly.

The Chinese government has made a decision to abandon its decades-old one-child policy, the state-run Xinhua News Agency reported at the end of October.

For China, another worrying issue is the unbalanced male to female ratio, one of the worst in the world at 115 to 100. After more than 35 years of one of the world’s most radical experiments in social engineering, Shanghai’s fertility rates have plunged to low levels according to nytimes.com article “The long shadow of China’s one-child policy” by Brook Larmer.

The One Child Policy has created problems that the Chinese government must now resolve. Deep personal anger and frustrations must inevitably be a byproduct of these societal pressures. Marriages are still being challenged, and we have heard from many friends over there that actually divorce is on the rise. In regard to societal peace, studies have shown the increasing number of crimes including sex trafficking – as a way to provide brides and carry on family lines-in China as a result of gender imbalance. “The working-age population is a concern and they think they need younger workers moving into the workplace”.

In order to help consumption growth, the government pledged to accelerate reform and innovation, help businesses adopt new technology to improve the quality of their products, encourage imports of consumer goods, open more duty-free shops, and improve tax refund policies for foreign tourists, according to the guideline.

In September, the UNFPA committed to spending another $22.5 million in China between 2016 and 2020, including $7 million for “sexual and reproductive health”, $7.5 million for “population dynamics” and $4 million for “adolescents and youth”. “If you look at fertility rates in Thailand and China, for example, they had very similar fertility rates in the 1970s and today”. Overall, China’s one-child policy may have worked too well and its reversal may have come too late, according to demographers and economists.

“The new policy also needs to be thoroughly vetted for dishonesty”, said Smith.

So the “two-child” policy may end up being of more symbolic importance than anything else.

Wang Pei’an, spokesman for the National Health and Family Planning Commission, said at a news conference that more than 90 million women will become eligible for having a second child when China formally moves away from the one-child policy to allow all couples to have two children. “There are also a few poor places with not enough education resources”. Many citizens, including both rural and urban Chinese, willingly chose to have one child. Population control has been an old practice in human history, but precisely because of its universal nature, it is imperative to demand a universal response and a set of ethics that can resist radical policies.