{"id":647,"date":"2013-08-05T11:20:34","date_gmt":"2013-08-05T15:20:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/web.colby.edu\/agingchina\/?p=647"},"modified":"2013-09-16T11:24:43","modified_gmt":"2013-09-16T15:24:43","slug":"china-to-end-one-child-policy-due-to-aging-crisis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/agingchina\/2013\/08\/05\/china-to-end-one-child-policy-due-to-aging-crisis\/","title":{"rendered":"China to End One-Child Policy Due to Aging Crisis"},"content":{"rendered":"

By\u00a0EWAN PALMER\u00a0: International Business Times,\u00a0August 5, 2013<\/a> 1:04 PM GMT<\/p>\n

\"China\u2019s<\/p>\n

Chinese authorities have said they are considering lifting their controversial one-child policy by the end of 2015, according to reports.<\/p>\n

State news agency Xinhua has said the country will look to relax the law which has been in place since 1978 to allow couples to have a second child if either parent is the only child by the end of the year.<\/p>\n

Currently, both parents must be sole children to be eligible for a second child.<\/p>\n

The new law could be extended to allow all families to have a second child by 2015. China previously\u00a0relaxed the policy to allow rural couples a second child if their first offspring was a girl.<\/p>\n

Mao Qun’an, director of the propaganda office at the National Health and Family Planning Commission, told Xinhua: “Our commission is organizing research on the size, quality, structure and distribution of the population so that we can propose plans to improve the policy.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

“We’ll have to move cautiously and coordinate between current situations and long-term objectives.<\/p>\n

Government researchers urged the nation to review the county’s one-child policy to cope with an aging population and labour shortages.<\/p>\n

The county’s ageing population means the number of people aged 65 and above is predicted to reach 29% by 2050 – up from 9% in 2011.<\/p>\n

Last year China’s working population fell for the first time in decades as a result of the one-child policy.<\/p>\n

“China’s one-child policy could be eased around end-2013. We believe that the reform-minded president Xi and premier Li will use the opportunity of abolishing the one-child policy to build up their authority, show their determination in making changes and convince the Chinese people that they do have a roadmap for reforms,” said Ting Lu and Xiaojia Zhi, China economists at Bank of America Merrill Lynch (BoFAML).<\/p>\n

BoFAML estimates more than two 9.5 million babies could be born if the policy was relaxed on top of the 16 million a year born in the mainland every year.<\/p>\n

The policy has always had some grey areas in terms of its strictness. As well as allowing farmers to have a second child as an additionm to their daughter, many of the rising middle class families in the country simply pay a fine if found to have a second child. Some cities such as Shanghai barely enforce the law due to falling fertility rates.<\/p>\n

The policy has resulted in hundreds of millions of abortions and sterilisations in the country. Recently\u00a0photos of a woman lying next to a near-fully developed baby after she was forced to have an abortion after being seven months pregnant<\/a>\u00a0caused outrage in the country.<\/p>\n

The woman was forced to terminate her pregnancy after she she could not pay the 40,000 yuan (\u00a34,000) fine for having a second child. The fine is 20 times the average annual wage of a rural worker in China.<\/p>\n

The government says the policy has prevented an additional 400 million births in the world’s most populous country of 1.3 billion.\u00a0China’s population is estimated to hit 1.4 billion by 2020.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By\u00a0EWAN PALMER\u00a0: International Business Times,\u00a0August 5, 2013 1:04 PM GMT Chinese authorities have said they are considering lifting their controversial one-child policy by the end of 2015, according to reports. State news agency Xinhua has said the country will look … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":295,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[74326],"tags":[74310,40860],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/agingchina\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/647"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/agingchina\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/agingchina\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/agingchina\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/295"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/agingchina\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=647"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/agingchina\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/647\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":648,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/agingchina\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/647\/revisions\/648"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/agingchina\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=647"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/agingchina\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=647"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/agingchina\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=647"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}