China has relaxed its family planning policy to allow couples to have three children after a census data showed a steep decline in birth rates, state media reported, in a major policy shift to boost birthrate in the world’s most populous nation.
For nearly 40 years, China enforced a controversial “one-child policy” – one of the strictest family planning regulations worldwide – which was relaxed in 2016 to a “two-child policy” due to widespread concerns about an ageing workforce and economic stagnation.
The latest move was approved by President Xi Jinping in a politburo meeting, state media say.
It will come with “supportive measures, which will be conducive to improving our country’s population structure, fulfilling the country’s strategy of actively coping with an ageing population and maintaining the advantage, endowment of human resources,” according to Xinhua news agency.
The leaders also agreed that China needs to raise its retirement age to keep more people in the workforce and improve pension and health services for the elderly, Xinhua said.
Despite government efforts to encourage couples to have children, China’s annual births have continued to plummet to a record low of 12 million in 2020, the National Bureau of Statistics said last month. China’s fertility rate stands at 1.3 — below the level needed to maintain a stable population, the bureau revealed.
The gender balance has also been skewed by decades of the one-child policy, and a traditional social preference for boys which prompted a generation of sex-selective abortions and abandoned baby girls.
The demographic shift in China has significant economic and political implications for the world’s second-biggest economy.
A third of Chinese people are forecast to be elderly by 2050, heaping huge pressure on the state to provide pensions and healthcare.
