- The Chinese government has announced that married couples may now have three children, following news of declining births and the growing population of retired persons
- However, a newly released national census reported that China has a birth rate of only 1.3 children per woman, when 2.1 is needed to maintain a balanced population
- Among the measures to be enacted to encourage additional births, China will lower educational costs for families, increase tax and housing support, guarantee the legal interests of working women and seek to end “sky-high” dowries
BEIJING, China: The Chinese government has announced that married couples may now have three children, following news of declining births and the growing population of retired persons.
Following decades of imposing a one child per couple dictate, begun in 1979, China allowed couples to have two children beginning in 2016.
However, a newly released national census reported that China has a birth rate of only 1.3 children per woman, when 2.1 is needed to maintain a balanced population.
Following a meeting chaired by President Xi Jinping, the official Xinhua news agency reported that the 3 child policy will include “supportive measures, which will be conducive to improving our country’s population structure, fulfilling the country’s strategy of actively coping with an aging population.”
Among the measures to be enacted to encourage additional births, China will lower educational costs for families, increase tax and housing support, guarantee the legal interests of working women and seek to end “sky-high” dowries, it was reported.
“People are held back not by the two-children limit, but by the incredibly high costs of raising children in today’s China. Housing, extracurricular activities, food, trips and everything else add up quickly,” said Yifei Li, a sociologist at NYU Shanghai, as reported by Reuters.
“Raising the limit itself is unlikely to tilt anyone’s calculus in a meaningful way, in my view.”
Another barrier to be overcome if women are to have more babies is the problem created when women are largely responsible for raising a child with little help.
According to Zhang Xinyu, a 30-year-old mother of one from Zhengzhou, “If men could do more to raise the child, or if families could give more consideration for women who had just had children, actually a lot of women would be able to have a second child,” she told Reuters.
“But thinking of the big picture, realistically, I don’t want to have a second child. And a third is even more impossible.”
Still, as late as 2020 families were being fined $20,440 for having a third child, according to a government notice in the city of Weihai.
In an interview with Reuters, Su Meizhen, a human resources manager in Beijing, said she was “super-happy” to be pregnant with her third child.
“We won’t have to pay the fine and we’ll be able to get a hukou,” she said.
A hukou is an urban residence permit that enables families to receive benefits, including sending their children to local public schools.
