The news that families who lost a child in the earthquake in China will receive the right to have new children greatly alleviated the emotional suffering of many thousands of people, because under strict Chinese laws, the right to another child is a rare privilege. At first, the authorities hardly intended anything more than a desire to console the grief of hundreds of thousands of affected families, but they inadvertently revived the debate about the wisdom of the 'one family, one child' strategy.
Back in February, Vice Minister of Family Planning Zhao Baige stated that the Chinese leadership intends to reconsider the birth control policy it has adhered to for 30 years. Currently, the law prohibits urban residents from having more than one child, and rural residents from having more than two (in some provinces, conceiving a second child is allowed if the first was a girl).
The vice minister's statement came as a particular surprise then. Just two months earlier, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao had already denied rumors of impending changes in the demographic policy of the world's most populous country.
Today, to have a child in China, permission from the local family planning committee is required. Moreover, marriage permission itself must be obtained at one's workplace. Then, after passing a medical examination and an interview at the neighborhood committee, one can have the wedding. But to have a baby, parents must again apply to the local committee, where they will be registered and issued a certificate indicating a period (usually a year) during which they can conceive a child. If they don't make it, the procedure starts again.
Debates about the need for reform are fueled by two acute problems: rapid population aging and an increasing proportion of men (lately, there have been more and more reports of pregnant Chinese women aborting female fetuses, as it is believed that a family needs a male breadwinner above all). Moreover, as Deputy Director of the Institute of Social Policy Oksana Sinyavskaya noted in an interview with a correspondent, 'China's demographic problems are exacerbated by the fact that until recently there was no pension system as such, and a child, growing up, faced the necessity of supporting the family alone on his own means.'
'China has fallen into a peculiar demographic trap,' Andrei Ostrovsky, head of the Center for Economic and Social Studies of China at the Institute of Far Eastern Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences, told Novye Izvestia. 'On the one hand, the country must curb population growth: Chinese experts have calculated that China's resources are sufficient for 1.5 billion people (currently about 1.32 billion live in China). And even despite the "one family, one child" program, the population continues to grow at a rate of about seven people per thousand per year.
It would seem that the birth control program helps to halve population growth (before its adoption, the increase was 15-17 people per thousand), but then another problem arises: population aging. Due to the decreasing proportion of young people, the demographic burden in the country has significantly increased. The only hope for the Chinese today is rapid urbanization. After all, the share of urban population has risen to 40%, and the government plans to increase it to 60%. At the same time, China's urban population is already not eager to have many children.'
Roman Dobrokhotov. 