BEIJING: China’s National Health Commission(NHC) said that the idea of abolishing the two-children policy – letting couples in northeastern China have as many children as they want – was “worth exploring.”
This was in response to a proposal drafted on the third session of the 13th National People’s Congress, the country’s top legislative body.
In a statement, the commission encouraged northeastern provinces to “conduct explorations” based on their situation on the ground and “consult experts” to assess how “fully removing birth control measures” would affect economic growth, social stability, public services and local resources.
The signal sparked heated debate on Chinese social media platforms, with many expressing doubts on whether the policy will work as a way to increase the number of new babies as they believe the decreasing birth rate in the region is a multifaceted problem that requires a lot more than just ending population controls. “Many people of my generation are the only child in our families, which means I have to raise my parents and grandparents in the future. If I get married, and have two more children, the burden will double. That is psychologically exhausting,” a netizen said on Sina weibo, a Twitter-like social media platform, adding “the problem of low birth rate is not the birth control policy, but the economy.” Another said that she doesn’t think she will get married one day, much less have a baby. As more young couples delay giving birth and are not willing to have more children, China’s fertility rate has been on a constant decline. In 2019, a total of 14.65 million babies were born in China, with a birth rate of 10.48 per 1,000, the lowest since 1949, according to the National Bureau of Statistics.
The demographic crisis in northeastern China is particularly severe. In the same year, the total number of new babies born in the three northeast provinces stood at 658,800, which only accounts for 6.1 percent of the region’s total population.
–The Daily Mail-CGTN
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