BEIJING (AP) – China will now allow couples to legally have a third child as it seeks to stem a demographic crisis that could threaten their hopes of increasing global prosperity and influence.
The ceremonial legislature on Friday amended the Population and Family Planning Act as part of a decades-long effort by the ruling Communist Party to dictate the size of families in accordance with political guidelines. It comes just six years after the last change.
Since the 1980s, China has strictly limited most couples to one child, a policy pursued with threats of fines or job losses, which led to abuses, including forced abortions. The preference for children led parents to kill girls, which led to a massive imbalance in the sex ratio.
The rules were first softened in 2015 to allow two children, as officials acknowledged the imminent consequences of falling birth rates. The overwhelming fear is that China will age before it gets rich.
China has long declared its one-child policy a success in preventing an additional 400 million births in the world’s most populous country, thus saving resources and helping to drive economic growth.
However, China’s birth rate, parallel to trends in South Korea, Thailand and other Asian economies, was already falling before the only child rule. According to the World Bank, the average number of children per mother fell from more than six in the 1960s to less than three in the 1980s.
Meanwhile, the number of people of working age in China has fallen over the past decade and the population has barely grown, which adds to the tensions of an aging society. According to a government census once a decade, the population was found to have risen to 1.411 billion people last year, an increase of 72 million from 2010.
Statistics show that 12 million babies were born last year, which would be down 18% from 14.6 million in 2019.
Chinese over the age of 60, totaling 264 million, accounted for 18.7% of the country’s total population in 2020, 5.44 percentage points more than in 2010. At the same time, the working-age population fell up to 63.3% of the total, from 70.1% a decade ago.
The change to the two-child rule led to a temporary increase in the number of births, but its effects soon faded and the total number of births continued to decline as many women continued to decide against the founding families.
Japan, Germany and some other rich countries face the same challenge of having fewer workers to support the aging population. Still, they can take advantage of investments in factories, technology and foreign assets, while China is a middle-income country with labor-intensive agriculture and manufacturing.
At its Friday session, the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress canceled the extension of fines for breaking previous restrictions and called for additional resources for parental leave and child care. New measures should be introduced in terms of funding, taxation, schooling, housing and employment to “alleviate the burden on families,” the amendment mentioned.
It also seeks to address long-standing discrimination against pregnant women and new mothers in the workplace that is considered one of the main disincentives to having additional children, along with high costs and reduced housing.
Although female representation in the labor force is high, women, especially those with children, are underrepresented at higher levels, holding only 8.4% of leadership positions at the central and provincial levels. Among the young party leaders who will take the reins in the coming decades, only 11% are women