BEIJING: China will ease family planning restrictions nationwide, the government said yesterday, allowing millions of families to have two children in the country’s most significant liberalisation of its strict one-child policy in about three decades.
Couples in which one parent is an only child will now be able to have a second child, one of the highlights of a sweeping raft of reforms announced three days after the ruling Communist Party ended a meeting that mapped out policy for the next decade.
The plan to ease the policy was envisioned by the government about five years ago as officials worried that the strict controls were undermining economic growth and contributing to a rapidly ageing population the country had no hope of supporting financially.
A growing number of scholars had long urged the government to reform the policy, introduced in the late 1970s to prevent population growth spiralling out of control, but now regarded by many experts as outdated and harmful to the economy.
While the easing of the controls will not have a substantial demographic impact in the world’s most populous nation, it could pave the way for the abolition of the policy. Wang Guangzhou, a demographer from top government think-tank, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, estimated the new policy would affect 30 million women of child-bearing age In a country which has nearly 1.4 billion people.
Although it is known internationally as the one-child policy, China’s rules governing family planning are more complicated.
Under current rules, urban couples are permitted a second child if both parents do not have siblings and rural couples are allowed to have two children if their first-born is a girl. There are numerous other exceptions as well, including looser rules for ethnic minorities and allowing parents who are themselves only children to have two children at most.
Any couple violating the policy has to pay a large fine.
REUTERS
