FILE PHOTO-Losing parents chant slogans during a rally outside China’s National Health and Family Planning Commission in Beijing.
China’s official media recently quoted experts as saying that the country’s family planning policy is expected to be further liberalized over the next five or more years in response to social problems such as an aging population and a declining workforce. Amid calls for reforming the country’s birth control policy and liberalizing childbirth, the question is also being raised whether the government should intervene in people’s childbearing affairs.
Official Media Discusses Aging and the Abolition of the Birth Control System
The official China Daily said last Monday that Beijing will introduce a more inclusive population policy to increase fertility and improve the quality of the workforce and population structure. The English-language newspaper quoted a Peking University demography professor as saying that more research and discussion was needed to see when and to what extent the policy would be further relaxed, whether to allow all couples to have three children, or to abolish the family planning system altogether.
On the same day, the Legal Daily also focused on this topic. An expert from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences interviewed by the newspaper went so far as to call for a reform of China’s birth control policy and a liberalization of the birth control system.
According to the Legal Daily, some experts suggested that, at the legal level, there is an urgent need for a more systematic, comprehensive, and fundamental revision of the Population and Family Planning Law, and the introduction of the Law on Public Service Guarantees for Population and Family Planning, in order to provide a legal guarantee for the long-term balanced development of China’s population.
Zheng Bingwen, director of the Center for World Social Security, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said at a forum in Beijing last month that “in order to actively deal with the aging of the population, the most urgent measure is to reform China’s fertility policy and liberalize childbirth.
Jiang Weiping, former director of China’s Population and Development Research Center, said recently that, in his view, China’s history of controlling population development is over. The government is now ready to return the fertility policy, which was formulated according to the national conditions at that time, to the normal state, where fertility is seen as normal and no longer necessary to be controlled, just normalized.
He told the Voice of America. “What is the future development? As the Cairo (International Conference on Population and Development) said, the responsible choice to have or not to have, how many to have and when to have them. The future is moving in that direction.”
Late last month, in a series of reports on related topics published in China Daily, the editor noted that significant achievements in economic development, environmental protection, and public health have helped extend life expectancy, but pose new challenges for China. Although China is expected to achieve its goal of eradicating absolute poverty by the end of this year, in the long run it must also face another daunting challenge – the rapid aging of its society.
China’s Growing Problem of Aging
China’s long-standing and stringent “one-child” family planning policy has been significantly relaxed in recent years, with slogans encouraging two children in some places, but the national fertility rate remains lower than expected.
In the decades leading up to 2015, frequent violations of women’s human rights, such as forced abortions and forced sterilizations, had a serious negative impact on China’s human rights record and international image.
The Chinese government has maintained that the brutal and inhumane practices in the implementation of its family planning policy were the work of local officials, not the advocacy of the central government.
In the 1980s, official propaganda promised parents of only children that the government would take care of them in their old age, but the slogan “the government will take care of the old age” has since become “take care of your own old age” in some places.
Rong Jian, an independent scholar in Beijing, has tweeted about China’s past family planning system. He pointed out that the slogan that lulled the people into believing that “only one is good, and the government will take care of the old age”, and that anyone who did not plan to have a family was forced to have a vasectomy or even a forced abortion, committing too many crimes to mention! The commentator said that now the slogan has changed: “One child is poor, two children are rich, and the Party is leading the way. It’s not that people don’t want a second child, he said, but that they can’t afford one.
On September 10, 2018, the Communist Party’s media, People’s Daily Overseas Edition, published an article stating: “It is unrealistic to rely on the government alone to bear the full burden of old-age pension, or we should establish a multi-level old-age security system, and the government, society and families should work together to solve the old-age problem.”
On August 6, 2012, a large number of single parents petitioned the Harbin municipal government outside the health and family planning department, urging the authorities to honor their promise of “government in old age.
According to projections, China’s elderly population will exceed 300 million between 2021 and 2025, and the society will move from a mildly aging to a moderately aging one.
More children to make up for the labor shortage?
Chinese authorities in 2015 began a limited easing of the “one-child” policy that had been a basic national policy for more than three decades, allowing most married couples to have two children in hopes of adding tens of millions of newborns to the country’s workforce over the next five to 35 years and easing the pressure on social and economic development brought on by an aging population.
Although the Chinese government has reportedly liberalized the “two-child” policy, the country’s birth rate has declined over the years instead of increasing, leading some Chinese scholars to argue that liberalization is imminent.
According to Jiang Weiping, who served as vice president and secretary general of the Chinese Population Society, expecting more children to solve the problems of an aging population and labor shortage is a low-level development initiative that cannot “quench the thirst” and should learn more from the experience of developed countries and vigorously develop modern technologies such as artificial intelligence and quantum computing to improve labor productivity and meet the needs of China’s economic and social development.
Jiang Weiping said that China’s former tightly constrained state is over, and now it has the conditions to promote the concept of fertility advocated by the 1994 Cairo Population Conference. He believes that the government should create conditions to provide quality services so that couples with the ability to have children can make their own choices voluntarily in a healthy and convenient environment, rather than encouraging or interfering artificially.
Experts: Voluntary Choice, Not Artificial Intervention
Sheng Hong, former director of Beijing’s Tenzing Institute of Economic Research, told VOA that many people don’t want to have more children after China let go of its two-child policy. He believes that encouraging births is a form of human intervention and should be opposed. Sheng Hong said that the current situation of China’s population is a consequence of the family planning system, and family planning is an insult to people’s reproductive rights. He expressed concern about the slogans and practices used in some places to encourage childbirth.
Sheng Hong said that many people actually do not have two children. He said. “The problem that the top management sees now is not the result of natural births, but the result of family planning. So it’s going to go to the other side and say we have a small population and we need to encourage births. In fact it’s the government interfering with births, and it’s the government interfering with births for the very reasons that make births fluctuate so much. This is a particularly bad thing. Many countries don’t intervene, and I think that’s the best policy. And if people are very aware of the costs and benefits of childbearing, they will actually make a conscious choice about how much they should have.”
Parents: let your children have a partner and give yourself a choice
China’s birth policy may be further relaxed, and families who already have children can expect to have more options, but every family may not feel the same way.
Shang Mingyi, who is in his mid-thirties and has a smart, adorable three-year-old daughter, is starting a business with a friend in Urumqi, Xinjiang. He told VOA that he and his wife hope to have another child, preferably a boy, so that they can have both children, and so that the child will have a companion and not be alone.
Mr. Shang, who was born at a time when China’s “one-child” policy was being enforced, has an older sister who is a few years older than him and was born a “supernumerary. He said it was good to have his sister growing up with him, so even if the birth policy is not relaxed, he and his wife will have another child, because he feels it is their right.
Mr. Shang also said, “It’s good to be liberal, because then you have a choice. It’s normal that some people don’t want to have another child because of economic or other reasons.
Ms. Chen, a former SOE manager who lives in Ningbo, Zhejiang Province, is the mother of a five-year-old baby girl. She told VOA that she and her family do not want to have any more children because they are content with their baby girl.
Ms. Chen is her parents’ only daughter in her mother’s family. She said that if she were to have another baby, it would put a lot of pressure on herself and her family, take too much time and energy, and reduce her quality of life.
However, the young mother also said that it is good that the government has relaxed the birth policy anyway, because if she gets pregnant again, she and the father of the child can consider whether to have or not. Under the previous system, she would have had to abort her growing child. She said, “If the one-child (policy) was in place, you would have had to abort it. If it were open, you would still have the choice of whether or not to abort. It’s definitely a choice.”
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