News Digest

China may bring in ‘two-child policy’ to tackle shrinking workforce

A Shanghai-based newspaper, citing an unnamed source, reports that China may replace its controversial one-child policy with a two-child policy toward the end of this year or the beginning of next. China Business News reports that a researcher at the National Health and Family Planning Commission was told that soon all Chinese would be allowed to have two children. This possibility comes nearly two years after what many are calling a failed rollback of the country’s birth quota policy for urban families. Approximately 11 million couples were granted the right to have a second child in early 2014, as long as one parent was an only child.

China is turning grey on an unprecedented scale in human history, and the government, even the whole Chinese society, isn’t prepared for it.

Yi Fuxian, author of A Big Country with an Empty Nest.

But a low number of parents chose to use the reform, roughly half of the projected 2 million had a second child in the new policy’s first year. The feeling that the reform did not answer Chinese people’s concerns for its aging population, declining workforce, and a deceleration in economic growth, may be why Premier Li Keqiang announced in March that the government would “push forward reform of birth-control management.” Yi Fuxian, author of “A Big Country with an Empty Nest,” said in an interview with Bloomberg that the late 2013 reform has not been enough to make a meaningful change to China’s demographic trend. The working-age population, those aged 16 to 59, fell by 3.71 million in 2014, the National Bureau of Statistics of China reported in January, much steeper than the decline of 2.44 million in 2013.