According to report reaching oyogist.com, China’s ruling Communist Party said on Monday that it would allow all married couples to have three children, ending a two-child policy that has failed to boost the country’s declining birthrates or address an impending demographic crisis.
The move reflected concerns that the rapidly rising number of older people in China could exacerbate a shortage of workers and strain the economy in the near future.
The party made the announcement after a meeting by the Politburo, a top decision-making body. It said the decision would “improve our country’s population structure and help implement a national strategy to actively respond to the aging population.”
Births in China have fallen for four consecutive years, including in 2020, when the number of babies born dropped to the lowest since the Mao era. The country’s total fertility rate — an estimate of the number of children born over a woman’s lifetime — now stands at 1.3, well below the replacement rate of 2.1.
Still, the announcement took several experts by surprise.
“This was a bit sudden and earlier than I expected,” said He Yafu, an independent demographer based in the southern Chinese city of Zhanjiang. “The decision makers have probably realized that the population situation is relatively severe.”
China’s rapidly graying population has started to impose increasing pressures on the state. In Monday’s announcement, the party said it would increase funding to expand services for the country’s retirees.
For decades, China’s family planning restrictions empowered the authorities to impose punishing fines on most couples who had more than one child and compel hundreds of millions of Chinese women to have abortions or undergo sterilization operations. Civil servants were fired for violating birth restrictions.
