Push to ease China's one-child policy

CHINA'S most populous province is trying to ease the country's decades-old one-child policy, with officials saying the high cost of bringing up children is enough to hold down birthrates.

The southern export hub of Guangdong has applied to the central government to allow qualified couples to have two children if either the husband or the wife is an only child, the official English-language China Daily newspaper said yesterday.

Zhang Feng, director of the Guangdong population and family-planning commission, said: "The province … is now waiting for approval to be the leader in the country in the relaxation of the family-planning policy."

After decades of rapid economic growth in the world's most populous nation, many of China's newly affluent are putting pressure on officials to ease restrictions that have been in place since the early 1980s. The Guangdong case could set a pattern for other regions.

Even as the one-child policy has created a host of new problems - including uneven and coercive enforcement measures, as well as a severe gender imbalance - China's huge population of 1.34 billion still exerts severe strains on the country's resources and the environment.

But proponents of a change have new economic arguments to support their case.

China's most recent census, the results of which were released in April, showed the proportion of young Chinese is shrinking as the elderly population grows, a fact many demographers have warned could choke the world's fastest-growing major economy as fewer people are left to work and pay for care for an older population.

The latest national population figure, based on the 2010 census, was up 5.9 per cent from the 1.27 billion counted in 2000, but lower than the 1.4 billion population some demographers had projected for the latest tally.

Guangdong's birth rate had remained low for more than ten years, Mr Zhang said, with women there giving birth to 1.7 children on average over the past decade.

Nationwide, government controls on family size have brought down annual population growth to below 1 per cent and the rate is projected to start falling in coming years, raising worrying questions about an ageing population.

While the central government enforces the one-child policy unevenly - couples in many urban areas who are themselves single children are permitted two of their own - policy makers have shown little intention of abandoning it.Other exemptions include some farming families, who require children to help them work the land, and certain ethnic groups.

Mr Zhang said: "I don't know whether the central government will give the green light to Guangdong or not, or when Guangdong's application will be approved, but the province now has room to relax the one-child policy, which has been in place for more than three decades."

He added that easing the policy would not lead to a baby boom because the cost of giving birth and raising children had risen steeply. Annual inflation in China hit a three-year high of 6.4 per cent in June.

While China is now the second-largest economy in the world, it ranks far lower on a per capita basis, and allowing the population to rise would only further strain employment demands and lead to other challenges for the government.