China attempts to loosen its one-child policy

[Barun Mitra]

Hurdles Seen for Change to China’s One-Child Rule
By CHRIS BUCKLEY
Published: November 17, 2013

HONG KONG — The Chinese government’s decision to relax a decades-old
one-child limit on couples has already encountered two problems likely
to test dozens of social and economic changes promised by President Xi
Jinping — vagaries about implementation and magnified public
expectations of even bigger changes ahead.

The limited curtailing of rules that restrict most city-dwelling
couples to raising just one child was a highlight of 60 proposed
reforms endorsed by a Communist Party Central Committee, which were
released to the public on Friday. The change will allow couples to
have two children if either the husband or wife is an only child.
Couples can now have two children only if each of the spouses is an
only child. Most rural families are already allowed to have two
children.

The Chinese state-run news media have celebrated the shift as
demonstrating that Mr. Xi’s government is willing to make changes that
have been debated, and delayed, for many years. But over the weekend,
a senior official in the National Health and Family Planning
Commission said that provincial-level governments would decide when to
carry out the new policy, and he stressed that the government had no
plans to further relax family size restrictions.

“There will not be a uniform nationwide timetable for starting
implementation,” Wang Pei’an, a vice minister of the commission, said
in a question-and-answer transcript issued by Xinhua, the state-run
news agency. “But it would be inadvisable for the lag in timing of
implementation between each area to be too long.”

Provincial-level governments include large municipalities, like
Beijing and Shanghai, which answer directly to the central government.

Wang Feng, a demographer who teaches at the University of California,
Irvine, and Fudan University in Shanghai, has estimated that the
policy change could lead to one million to two million extra births in
China every year, on top of the 15 million or so births a year now.
But that limited change has aroused hopes among experts and citizens
that the government could let all couples have two children, and
eventually even scrap state limits on family size.

“Two children should be the standard,” Zhang Yuan, a civil servant in
Nanjing, a city in Jiangsu Province, eastern China, said in a
telephone interview. She said she was already eligible to have two
children, as both she and her husband were only children.

“Even if the policy was further relaxed, it’s not necessarily so that
every couple will have more kids,” she said. “It’s a huge pressure to
raise a kid, especially in China.”

But, she said, she and her husband were thinking about having a second
child in two or three years, in addition to their 2-year-old daughter.
“I’m not very concerned about the financial pressure. Rich or not, you
can raise the kids either way.”

Mr. Wang, the health commission official, emphatically said no to
ideas of a further relaxation of the general one-child rule.

“Adjusting and improving family-planning policy is not tantamount to
relaxing that policy,” Mr. Wang said. Allowing all urban couples to
have two children would create too many burdens for society, he said.

“There would be a quite serious concentration of births that would
impose very heavy pressure on basic public services,” he said. “In the
longer term, that would create a cyclical surge in births, so the
total population would experience sustained growth, and the arrival of
the population peak would be delayed.”

The relaxation was possible because of China’s slowed population
growth, and in the longer term it will help to offset the pressures of
coping with an aging society, Mr. Wang said. But the policy change
will not significantly alter China from its course toward an
increasingly old society with a slowly shrinking labor force, said Hua
Sheng, an economist at Southeast University in Nanjing.

“There’s unlikely to be a major short-term impact,” Professor Hua
said. “The economic impact also will depend on how much actual
behavior changes. But the real significance is that it’s a positive
signal — the first major change in family planning after many years.”

The party Central Committee meeting that endorsed the change in family
policy also vowed to abolish re-education through labor, a form of
punishment that can be used to imprison people for up to four years
without any real judicial scrutiny or chance to appeal. But that
proposal, as well as a slew of economic changes promised by the
committee, also await detailed rules for implementation.

For eligible couples, the question of whether to have a second child
will come down to choosing between the pleasure and benefits of
another child against the pressures in a society where health care,
schooling and housing costs can be daunting even for prosperous
members of the middle class.

Li Xuebing, a real estate advertising salesman in Beijing, said he and
his wife would be eligible to have another child under the new policy,
in addition to their 18-month-old son.

“Ever since the first, we’ve wanted to have a second child,” he said.

“I’m an only child, and my experience growing up was that an only
child carries too many burdens from the family’s expectations,” Mr. Li
said. “I think this policy opening will grow bigger and bigger.”

Patrick Zuo contributed research from Beijing.

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/18/world/asia/chinas-vow-to-relax-one-child-policy-faces-reality-check.html