China will now allow parents to have three children, in an attempt to avoid a demographic crisis that deprives it of its goals of economic growth and geopolitical influence.
The national legislature, basically ceremonial in nature, amended the Family Planning Act as part of a decades-long attempt by the Communist Party to decide the size of the nation’s families, in accordance with its political guidelines. The reform was implemented just six years after the previous reform.
Since the 1980s, China has only allowed families to have a child or else they would suffer threats of fines or loss of employment. The rule led to a lot of abuse, even forced abortions. The sexist and patriarchal character of Chinese society caused many families to kill their descendants when they were baby girls, so today there is a huge imbalance in the proportion of both sexes.
The rules were relaxed for the first time in 2015, when couples were allowed to have two children, given the evidence of the consequences that a negative birth rate would have. The biggest fear is that China will age before it reaches a situation of prosperity.
For a long time, China was proud of its policy of one child per family, claiming that it managed to prevent 400 million births in the world’s most populous country, saving resources and accelerating economic growth.
However, China’s birth rate – as is the case in South Korea, Thailand and other Asian countries – was already declining before the one-child policy. The average number of children per mother decreased from six in the 1960s to less than three in the 1980s, according to the World Bank.
Meanwhile, the number of people of working age in China has declined over the past decade and the population has barely grown, which adds to the tensions in an aging society. The government census conducted every decade found that the population increased to 1,411 million people last year, 72 million more than in 2010.
Statistics show that 12 million babies were born in China last year, 18% less than the 14.6 million in 2019.
The 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 was fall to 63.3% of the total since 70.1% a decade ago.
The change to the two-child rule caused a temporary increase in the number of births, but its effects soon disappeared and the total number of births continued to fall because many women continued to decide not to start a family.