The government is now encouraging its citizens to have more children.
After decades of enforcing abortion policies, why is now China encouraging citizens to have more children?
Nearly four decades after Beijing authorities began its efforts to restrict the number of babies Chinese women could have, using draconian measures such as the one-child policy to fulfill their will, the government is now encouraging its citizens to have more children. China’s society, with a population of 1.37 billion inhabitants, has an aging problem, and the government is trying to reverse that.
China’s aging society problem appears to be worsening every year, and the latest official statistics reveal that both its birth and marriage rates have dropped significantly. Several factors have led to this situation. On the one hand, there is the growth in life expectancy of the average Chinese, which in the last half-century has gone from 57.6 years to 76.7, according to World Bank data. According to the firm Statista, by the year 2020, it is estimated that there will be 250 million people over 60 years of age, but that figure will soar within two decades to 426 million (30 percent of the total population).
But the bad news doesn’t end there. While these two variables are growing, the working-age population is continuously decreasing since 2010, a trend that is expected to continue in the future (up to 100 million fewer workers by 2035, according to a recent study by the Chinese government). A dangerous combination that, along with the lack of an adequate social security system and a low birth rate of 1.6 children per woman, threatens to turn the population pyramid into a rhombus that undermines the economic resources of the state and Chinese families.
The beginning of this scenario took shape with the imposition of the brutal one-child policy back in 1979, when the law was promulgated by the Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping. Since then, Communist leaders argued for decades that this authoritarian social experiment at gigantic scale helped them to control population growth and to fight poverty. However, in 2013, the government itself acknowledged the implications of the law on the aging of its population and the current imbalance in the male/female ratio — it is estimated that there are approximately 33.5 million more men than women in the country — and started allowing couples in which both were single children to have two sons if they wished. A few years later, the option of having two children was extended to all the citizens.
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According to Chen Youhua, a demographer from Nanjing University quoted in The South China Morning Post, the lower birth rate was mainly to do with a drop in the number of women at childbearing age — a population structure resulting from the low birth rate in the 1990s.
