Chinese women may prefer one child even when it's not official policy

The announcement that China is to alter its one-child policy, as it seeks to prepare itself for population ageing, has got the public talking.

The government will soon allow a second child to all who are themselves an only child or whose spouse is an only child. While reporting the news, a CCTV report said that the one-child policy prevented some 400 million births, the equivalent of the US population.

However, this conclusion is flawed in two ways. First of all, we should note that the policy was created at a time when overpopulation was a major concern not only in China, but the world over. Governments and international organisations made it a priority to study whether the world was heading for disaster, where a population explosion would lead to overconsumption, the draining of resources, resulting in drought and famine. Some studies concluded that this dismal future was inevitable.

Some nations went so far as to mount a campaign of sterilisation. In China, the government saw a solution in the one-child policy.

As time went on, however, it became clear that the doomsday predictions had been overblown.

Instead, many parts of the world witnessed a decline in birth rates, which we are still experiencing today. This happened not because of draconian policies such as sterilisation and population control, but has been due mainly to an agricultural revolution that enabled more food to be grown and, more importantly, urbanisation and the changing role of women.

The last point brings us to the second flaw. Throughout the past decade or two, we have seen that just because a woman can have more than one child, as is true in most places outside China, it doesn't necessarily mean she will. In fact, it is becoming increasingly common for women not to have any children.