BEIJING: China has further relaxed its family planning policy to allow couples to have a maximum of three children after a recent census showed its population is rapidly aging, Chinese media reported Monday.
In 2016 China relaxed its controversial “one-child policy” — one of the world´s strictest family planning regulations — to a “two-child policy” due to widespread concerns over an aging workforce and economic stagnation.
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, as the cost of living rises and women increasingly make their own family planning choices.
The slump threatens a demographic crisis that has alarmed the ruling Communist Party headed by President Xi Jinping, booking in a shortage of young workers to drive an economy experts to say will by 2050 will have to support hundreds of millions of elderly.
A Monday meeting of the elite Politburo leadership committee hosted by Xi announced a further loosening of the state´s control over the size of families.
“To actively respond to the aging population … a couple can have three children,” state media Xinhua reported.
The Politburo meeting also promised “accompanying support measures” that are also “conducive to the country´s population structure”, though these were left unspecified.
China´s fertility rate stands at 1.3 — below the level needed to maintain a stable population, the National Bureau of Statistics revealed.
The once-in-a-decade 2020 census results published last month also showed that China´s population grew at its slowest rate since the 1960s, reaching 1.41 billion.
China´s 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.
