China on Monday said it would allow all married couples to have three children, up from the limit of two, as it further loosened decades of population controls that have left the country in a demographic crisis.
The policy change, announced at a Politburo meeting chaired by Chinese leader Xi Jinping, was aimed at “maintaining national security and social stability” and keeping “our country’s advantages in human resource endowments,” the powerful decision-making body said, according to state news agency Xinhua.
The announcement came as a surprise to many and appeared to reflect alarm among Chinese leaders about growth trends — an issue that has become increasingly politically sensitive.
In May, the results of a once-in-a-decade census showed China’s population growth over the past decade was its slowest since the 1950s, with the population reaching 1.41 billion in 2020 from 1.40 billion in 2019. Average annual population growth over the past decade was just 0.53 percent.
Officials delayed the release of that data, originally slated for April, sparking speculation that China’s population had already begun to shrink. Experts say that a quickly aging population and a shrinking labor force could derail economic growth in the world’s most populous country.
As new data exposed the vulnerabilities in China’s growth model, calls for scrapping restrictions on family size — from demographers to central bank officials and entrepreneurs — have gained urgency.
Yet China’s leaders stopped short of completely dropping the deeply unpopular family-planning regime in place since 1980 — often brutally enforced, through forced abortions, sterilizations and steep fines.
Keeping the limits in place, researchers say, is a way to maintain control.
“It is the same statist and planning mentality,” said Yong Cai, a sociologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who studies China’s birth policies.
The new three-child rule “is unlikely to have major demographic effect,” he said. “China should have abandoned its birth planning altogether.”
China’s birthrates have fallen consecutively for four years, to 12 million in 2020, the lowest figure since 1961, when the country was emerging from the grips of mass famine. China’s fertility rate is one of the world’s lowest, at 1.3 births per woman, well below the “replacement rate” of 2.1 births per woman considered necessary to maintain a stable population. (Washington Post)