Chinese couples urged to have more children

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jan/29/chinese-couples-urged-have-more-children

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For decades, most urban Chinese families could have only one child. Now officials in China’s biggest city are telling young couples: please have more children.

Fan Hua, of Shanghai’s family planning commission, said fewer people than expected had taken advantage of a recent rule change that allows more households to bear a second child.

The Qianjiang Evening News quoted Fan as saying that 90% of the city’s women of child-bearing age were eligible for a second child under the change made in 2013, but that only 5% had applied. Shanghai officials urged more households to do so.

China’s birth rate is among the lowest of developing countries, nearly four decades after the country restricted most urban couples to having one child.

An ageing society threatens to slow down China’s booming economy and overload its pension system when too few workers will be supporting growing numbers of the elderly.

“It’s very clear that the next 10 to 15 years down the road will not be so good-looking,” said Yong Cai, a sociology professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

“China should have changed this policy at least 10 years earlier when the economic and social situation was quite different. My view is quite pessimistic, that the policy change announced last year was too little, too late.”

The governor’s office of Shandong province, one of the country’s most populous, has also called attention to the consequences of the one-child rule, noting that Shandong had about 20% more men than women, according to the China Youth Daily newspaper. Many couples restricted to one child abort female foetuses until they have a male baby.

The figures have contributed to speculation that the Chinese government will further relax regulations on family sizes.

Many Chinese couples are refraining from having more than one child as education and other costs soar, Yong said. Birth rates in neighbouring Asian countries, as well as in Hong Kong and Taiwan, have also dropped.