Beijing unfazed by drop in births despite ending the one-child policy
Beijing shrugged off criticism that a partial relaxation of the “one-child” policy in 2014 failed, attributing an unexpected fall in the birth rate last year to superstition and a drop in the number of women of child-bearing age.
Some 16.55 million births were recorded last year – 320,000 less than the previous year, the National Bureau of Statistics announced on Tuesday.
The health authority predicted last February there would be one million additional births in 2015 after one million couples had applied to have a second child. In 2014, Beijing allowed couples where one partner was a single child to have a second one. The policy was extended to all couples on January 1.
The National Health and Family Planning Commission yesterday said the reason for the drop was two-fold. Many couples, especially in the north, had waited to have a child until the Year of the Goat turned into the Year of the Monkey, which is viewed as a more auspicious animal.
The number of women registering with hospitals for pregnancies rose sharply in the second half of the year. Beijing, for example, recorded a 36 per cent increase in July over the month before.
The commission also said the number of women of child-bearing age peaked in 2011 and that last year the number of women in their 20s declined by 1.5 million.
It predicted a “significant increase” in birth numbers this year.
But a demographer warned that couples were becoming less enthusiastic about births. “Ninety per cent of births are given by women from 20 to 29 years old in China,” said Yuan Xin, an expert at Nankai University. “The number of second-child births has been increasing and offset some of the [decline in] first births, but still, total births dropped in 2015.”