By: Alvin Wilson Staff Writer
China announced late last month that the government will lift their one-child policy, which was put into place 35 years ago in order to prevent rapid population growth.
The one-child policy was introduced in China in 1980 and was implemented to reduce the strain on resources as the country’s population and economy continued to grow exponentially.
According to the Chinese government, the one-child policy helped prevent 400 million births, which they credit with raising millions of people out of poverty. Now, however, they risk running out of young workers to support their aging population.
Data from the U.N. shows that by the 2030, a quarter of China’s population will be older than 60.
The country’s leaders made the decision to lift the policy in order to counter the risk of losing their powerful workforce, but some demographers fear it is too late to completely prevent it.
The new policy will allow all Chinese women to have up to two children.
According to the Population Reference Bureau, the new policy will result in an estimated 23 million more births by the year 2050. If almost every woman in China decides to have two children, however, the number of new births could be as high as 100 million.
This won’t stop the change in China’s worker demographic, but it will give the Chinese government more time before they see a shortage in workers.
This new policy has been implemented slowly over the past few years.
Starting in 2013, couples could have two children if either parent had no siblings. Rural couples in China were already able to have two children if their first child was a girl, and certain ethnic groups were exempt from the one-child policy.
Lifting the child limit to two is seen by some as a big step forward, especially because the one-child policy had been in place for such a long time, but others think China’s government hasn’t gone far enough, claiming that the government shouldn’t control reproductive rights at all.
