Opinion | Slow and steady is the way to ease China's one-child policy
Hu Shuli says China will greatly benefit from allowing couples to have a second child, a decision that belongs in the home anyway
There's no doubt China must review its family planning policy to meet the challenge of a greying population. But how? Recent comments by officials at the National Health and Family Planning Commission have sparked a debate.
Allowing more couples to have a second child is clearly the goal. But the last thing the government wants is a sudden population surge if rules were relaxed too quickly.
Any change to the one-child policy, which has been in force for more than 30 years, requires careful consideration. Policymakers must lay out their plan, complete with a timetable, and adjust it as necessary during implementation.
The last thing the government wants is a surge if rules were relaxed too quickly
China has become a victim of its own success in population control. Its fertility rate has dropped to between 1.04 and 1.5 - depending on the method of calculation by different government departments - which is far lower than the replacement level of 2.1. UN estimates say the population will peak at 1.45 billion, in a decade or more, before starting to slide.
Population explosion is no longer a serious worry; a skewed demographic structure is, thanks to the combined effect of the one-child policy and longer life spans. China became a greying society as early as 1999, according to the UN, with growing pressures put on its pension system and social services. Its labour force even shrank last year for the first time in recent memory. As a result, the calls to relax birth controls will only grow louder.
After all, the costs of these controls have been immense, both in terms of resources and political capital. In the name of enforcing the law, some local governments and administrative departments have infringed people's rights by resorting to abusive, sometimes illegal, tactics, a blow to the image of party and government.
Conversely, allowing more couples to have a second child can help ease the labour shortage that impedes growth, relieve pressure on social security payouts and reduce the huge costs of sustaining a family planning bureaucracy staffed by over 400,000 people. It will also help prevent the tragedy of "left behind parents" whose only child died young, and help curb the abduction and selling of children by officials who misuse the law to make money.
The long-term benefits are immense. One, it will slowly move family planning decisions out of government hands and into people's homes, where they belong, in line with the new leadership's pledge to respect people's rights.