BEIJING (NYTIMES) – One proposal would end financial penalties for babies born out of wedlock. Another would lower the legal age of marriage. Others would ban discrimination against mothers and mothers-to-be in the workplace and would expand or extend parental leave to fathers..
BEIJING (NYTIMES) – One proposal would end financial penalties for babies born out of wedlock. Another would lower the legal age of marriage. Others would ban discrimination against mothers and mothers-to-be in the workplace and would expand or extend parental leave to fathers.
China’s annual legislative session – the National People’s Congress – is typically a staid affair to aggrandise Communist Party rule, but this year it has produced a flurry of proposals to address what experts and officials now acknowledge is a looming demographic crisis caused by the country’s sharply declining birthrate.
The ideas now being floated by regional officials, businesspeople and others reflect the depth of the concern over the issue, but also the fact that there is not yet a clear consensus on what the government should do about it.
One deputy, Ms Huang Xihua, went so far as to propose amending the Constitution to remove all limits on family planning, which until 2016 notoriously forbade most Chinese families from having more than one child.
« The reason so many deputies are putting proposals forward is that the birthrate has declined for two consecutive years, » Mr He Yafu, a demographer and the author of a book on the impact of China’s population controls who helped Ms Huang write her proposal, said in a telephone interview.
« The reasons to limit births no longer exist. »
The government has, so far at least, showed no sign of abdicating its heavy-handed approach to social policy – nor the vast bureaucracy that still enforces family planning laws.
For more than three decades, China enforced its « one child » policy harshly, imposing fines and in some cases abortions and sterilisations.
The government only relented in 2016 after experts anticipated the demographic issues that the country is now facing.
Virtually all families can now have two children, but the anticipated baby boom did not materialise.
