From the 1970's the Chinese Communist Party has enforced that couples were only allowed to have one child. However, this policy on Thursday has been changed to allow Chinese couples to have two children. This came from the fear of the aging population jeopardizing the amount of economic growth China would be able to achieve.
Even though this gives Chinese citizens a heightened sense of freedom and choice about their personal lives, the party is unsure how quickly the birthrate will go up in the near future. It will go up certainly, but by how much no one is certain.
Restrictions were lessened in 2013 allowing couples to have two children if one of the parents were an only child. However, many couples declined the offer to have another child because of the expense and the pressure to raise children in a highly competitive atmosphere. With that being said only 12% people eligible to have a second child took advantage of it.
When asked about the new policy that came out this morning, some people were happy, but most of the society was either ambivalent or adamant that they would not be having a second child.
Currently 1/10 of the population of China is over 65. However, by 2027 this is expected to rise to 15% and to 20% by 2035. Consequently, due to these vast increases in retired individuals there will not be enough working people during those years to support them according to the numbers now.
I agree with Mr. Liang when he says, "“It’s not just a problem of whether you permit ordinary people to have one or two kids. It’s about returning their reproductive rights to them,” Mr. Liang said in a telephone interview from Shanghai. “In over 200 countries and regions around the world, which of them nowadays controls people’s reproduction like this?”
Do you think this policy will be effective for China?
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/30/world/asia/china-end-one-child-policy.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=first-column-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0
9 comments:
In my opinion it is important for the Chinese administration to make these changes. With 10% of the population over 65, China needs to bring in more youth to offset the large amount of elderly Chinese unemployed. I believe this will help correct the current slowdown of production and economic growth in China because more babies means more future workers for China.
I think this relates to our discussions of state planning and the complexities of doing so. It is really hard to manage all the different facets of a society and there are bound to be unintended consequences of policy, only to be discovered years late. This is one such "hole" that the Chinese State will have to dig themselves out of.
I think this change in policy is both positive and negative. A positive is that having girls won't be as looked down upon as it used to. It also will help replenish the population. However, there are a lot of other negatives, like how will the infrastructure be able to support a boom in population? How will this affect the environment, since China has such pollution problems. Also, will people actually have second children? I've read other places people are more hesitant to have more children because of all the work and money that goes into it. I feel like we won't have a clear image of what this change will look like until a few years down the road.
I agree with Emily, people in China now are worried the most about cannot afford to have a second child. A lot of people who already have a child said they might not want to have a second one, they certainly do have a lot of concerns of not going to be able to provide a good environment for their children if they are having financial struggles
Emily makes good points. China has been known for this one child policies and families would go out of their way to have a boy as their one child because in the Chinese culture their son is responsible for supporting his parents as they age. This has caused a gender distribution problem so it will be interesting to see if more females will be kept and not put up for adoption by their parents. With that said, China already has a very large population that it's economy can't fully support so it could be detrimental to their ability to take care of their people.
I agree with Tyler as well as Nate above. I think that the one child policy implemented by the Chinese central planning board has caused many unforeseen consequences. I also think those unforeseen consequences, while unpredictable, show a major fault of the socialist economic system. The system centers itself around the fact that due to incomplete information, the capitalist system does not work, and so the government must intervene. Therefore, the socialist system seeks to take away the lack of incomplete information through government involvement.
I think the Chinese government failed in the aspect that they did not foreseen this problem till after it was too late. Not only is the Chinese population too big to be supported by the government, but now the population is aging and there is such a high gender gap it will be hard to fix. I am very interested into see what occurs in the coming months in China. I do think that more women will be born, but I agree with Nate in that I do not think that Chinese government will be able to handle the sudden influx of individuals.
It is evidently imperative that more youth need to be generated into the population due to the rapidly aging current population, and the future lack of economic growth due to that. Also, as we learned in class factors such as seniority often stunt the energetic ideas of youth and stunts further economic innovation and growth. Therefore, with a larger younger population, perhaps innovation will spike.
On the other hand, Emily makes a good point in that the new policy seems idealistic until other factors are taken into deeper consideration. How will they juggle they new policy in regards to their current economic issues? Have the prepared? There is certainly room for a number of issues to arise such as pollution, gender distribution, adoption rates, and the plausibility of the overall policy.
I think overall this is a step in the right direction for China. While I do not think that families currently will take advantage of the child allowance increase, I do think the children now growing up in an environment where this is allowed will take advantage of the opportunity. I think by the time people begin to start actually taking advantage of this benefit, the government will have policies in place to take care of the increase of people. By saying that, I think the government has time to make these changes, however they need to start as soon as possible because birth rates will only go up as the details are ironed out for families and it becomes more attractive to have another child.
While I do agree with everyone who has mentioned that this shift could put pressure on the state's infrastructure, I agree with Ashley in that there is hope that the government will have time to establish new policies to address the new stresses that arise. The Chinese culture has been a competitive one, and until there is more incentive for them to take advantage of this new policy, I don't think that many families will decide to have a second child. The cost for rearing another child is high and until there is infrastructure to match the demands that having more children would require. While I understand why policies like limiting the amount of children per family are enacted, I don't agree with them, so I do believe that this is a positive decision.
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