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It’s election day and that’s what we’re all focused on. We will be diving into all of that later today (and probably late into the night) but for now some news from the other side of the world.
China is no longer the most populous country in the world. It lost that title to India in 2022 and for the past two years its population has dropped. For years, China had enforced a one-child policy on couples but it ended that in 2016 and is now in the midst of a nationwide effort to encourage more marriages and bigger families.
China’s central government last month issued a package of policies that provides various incentives to ease the costs of raising children amid a looming demographic crisis.
To those who witnessed and experienced the mainland’s draconian one-child policy for over three decades, Beijing’s latest initiative to help cultivate a “birth-friendly society” marks quite an about-turn from the rigid enforcement of hefty fines and forced abortions during that Kafkaesque period.
In retrospect, China’s ruthless family planning regime had gone too far. Beijing officially ended its one-child policy in January 2016 in favour of a two-child policy, before introducing a three-child policy in May 2021. Still, those changes were too little, too late.
What China is seeing now is a collapse in the number of marriages. This year is on track to be the lowest number since records were kept.
