Family planning stands pat in China
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E-mail China Daily, January 16, 2013
China will stick with its current family planning policy to maintain the country's low birthrate but will make an effort to fine-tune it, the country's population planning chief said.
Wang Xia, minister of the National Population and Family Planning Commission, made the remarks at a national conference in Beijing on Monday amid widespread speculation that the one-child rule on the Chinese mainland might soon be relaxed.
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Parents and family members hold five sets of twins who were born on the same day at No 1 People's Hospital of Xiangyang, Hubei province, in May. [Photo/China Daily] |
"Maintaining a low birthrate remains a top priority in 2013 and beyond. But policy implementation has to fit into local situations," she said.
China has maintained a low birthrate for about 20 years, said Lu Jiehua, a social demographics professor at Peking University.
Many people, including academics, have called for relaxing the policy to better meet new demographic challenges such as a rapidly aging society, a skewed gender ratio and a rising labor shortage.
But Zhai Zhenwu, dean of the School of Sociology and Population Studies at Renmin University of China, doesn't agree with that strategy.
Zhai said China's current low birthrate is not stable and would rebound sharply in most parts of the country if the family planning policy were to be abandoned.
The birthrate on the mainland was 11.93 per 1,000 in 2011, a decrease of 0.93 per 1,000 from 2002, according to the National Bureau of Statistics.
China's population topped 1.34 billion by the end of 2011, an increase of more than 60 million over 2000, the bureau said.
The total birthrate, the average number of children a woman gives birth to, has fallen to about 1.6, an even lower level than in some developed economies, such as the UK.
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