Claims have been made that China abolishing their one child policy won’t help the country.
The policy will come into effect from March 2016 but it is unclear whether ending China’s more than 30 year-long child policy will trigger a demographic change that the Chinese Communist Party hopes for.
The East Asia Forum have reported that the abandonment of the one-child policy may not cause a significant rise in the population of China.
They’ve said that Yuan Xin, an expert in population studies at Nankai University in Tianjin, has observed that the traditional Chinese concept of having multiple children has changed alongside developments in China’s economy and society over the past few decades.
The National Health and Family Planning Commission (NHFPC) itself has agreed that, ‘it has been a mainstream concept among Beijing residents to give birth to fewer and better children after decades of the family planning policies the city adopted in the 1970s’.
The one-child era prompted both a change in mind set more people are opting for fewer children, especially in big cities such as Beijing. Couples with only one child mainly live in the cities, where the cost of housing and education is comparatively high. Most of them tend to choose not to have a second child owing to financial pressures.
Figures released in a survey conducted by China Youth Daily, 84.9 per cent of respondents reported worrying about the financial pressure of raising a second child. Couples who are wealthy enough that they can afford to bring up a second child are usually over 40 years old and are confronted with difficulties in giving birth.
According to The Wall Street Journal, Most Chinese families spend more proportionately. It costs on average about 190,000 yuan, or about $30,000 to raise a child through age 18 in China, according to researchers at the Southwestern University of Finance and Economics in Chengdu. That’s about 15% of the average Chinese household income.
Hopeful estimates say the new relaxation will bring between 3 million and 6 million babies a year in the five years from 2017 and 120 billion yuan to 240 billion yuan in additional spending, according to Credit Suisse, though the last birth-policy relaxation, in 2013, yielded far fewer second-child applications than expected.
Photo by: joan vila