China’s plan to remove its strict one-child policy marks “the end of an era” for a nation once known for its young population, high growth, and rapid development, Fordham Law Professor Carl Minzner said during an interview last week.
An aging workforce and a growing gender imbalance have forced leaders of the world’s most populous nation to begin grappling with an uncertain post-Reform Era future.
“China faces an impending demographic catastrophe where the population of over 60–year-olds is going to rise dramatically over the next decade,” Minzner said. “Chinese authorities recognize this and are trying to decide what to do about it. This is one step in that effort.”
The Chinese government projects its population will rise three million people per year once it passes a two-child policy, possibly as soon as March 2016. Such a baby boom is unlikely, Minzner said, due to rising education and childcare costs, among other factors.
To support his assertion, Minzner pointed to the modest population growth that happened after the government relaxed its one-child policy in 2013, allowing couples to have a second child if one spouse was an only child. That policy changed resulted in 30,000 additional births in Shanghai, or a child born to 6.7 percent of eligible couples, according to state leaders.
“People are cognizant of how expensive it’s going to be and they are less interested in having more children,” Minzner said, explaining that the country faces similar issues in this regard as other developing countries. At some point, China may consider offering economic incentives, much like the Nordic countries do, to lessen the economic burden of couples considering a second child, he added.
China enacted its one-child policy in 1979 as a means to slow its exploding population, which counted almost one billion residents at the time. One of the consequences that arose from that policy—and also from technology advances such as sex-selective sonography—is China’s gender imbalance; the country expects to have 20 million more men than women in 2020.
This situation not only makes it more difficult for poorer men in rural areas to marry but also leads to prostitution, kidnapping, and other social ills, Minzner said. Human rights and women’s activists have also decried the one-child policy as unfair governance over women’s bodies.
The new policy, while an economics-driven decision, represents a step forward in terms of human rights, Minzner said.
What it doesn’t necessarily represent is a silver bullet for all that ails the country. China’s birth rate is in the world’s bottom third, and it is likely to remain there, if countries such as Taiwan and South Korea, that have also experienced dramatic declines in birth rates, are any indication.
“There’s not much likelihood China can significantly alter that trajectory even with a couple of decades,” Minzner said. “It’s going to be a country that gets old before it gets rich.”
–Ray Legendre
