1-child rule to continue in China

By Jim Yardley
New York Times News Service
Published: Tuesday, March 11, 2008 12:32 a.m. MDT
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BEIJING — China's top population official said the country's one-child-per-couple family-planning policy would not change for at least another decade. The announcement rebuts speculation that officials were contemplating adjustments to compensate for mounting demographic pressures.

The official, Zhang Weiqing, minister of the National Population and Family Planning Commission, said China would not make any major changes to the overall family-planning policy until roughly a decade from now, when an anticipated surge in births is expected to end.

"The current family-planning policy, formed as a result of gradual changes in the past two decades, has proved compatible with national conditions," Zhang said in a front-page interview published Monday in China Daily, the country's official English-language newspaper.

"So it has to be kept unchanged at this time to ensure stable and balanced population growth."

Zhang said that 200 million people would enter childbearing age during the next decade and that prematurely abandoning the one-child policy could add unwanted volatility to the birthrate.

"Given such a large population base, there would be major fluctuations in population growth if we abandoned the one-child rule now," he said. "It would cause serious problems and add extra pressure on social and economic development."

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China, with more than 1.3 billion people, is the world's most populous nation. For nearly three decades, it has enforced one of the world's strictest family-planning policies. Most urban couples are limited to a single child, while farmers are often allowed to have two. Minority families can sometimes have two or more children. Critics say the policy is coercive and has led to numerous abuses, including forced abortions, which continue in some areas.

Today, China has a rapidly aging society that demographers warn could present significant problems. Already, the work force is defying the popular impression that the labor supply is endless. Factories have reported shortages of young workers in recent years. At the same time, the one-child policy is considered a contributing factor to a gender imbalance that has raised concerns that there may be too few women in the future.

Even with China's family-planning restrictions, China Daily reported that the population was growing by up to 17 million people a year and should peak at 1.5 billion by the mid-2030s.

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