China allows couples to have three children
A lot of people are asking why a policy is even still needed - why not go for no limit at all?
1) There is an entire family planning bureaucracy within the CCP setup to manage this; would do you do with all those people if they are not needed anymore?
2) China is more strict on population planning for certain minorities - not officially, but in the background; think Muslims in western China or Tibet or Mongolians, or ethnic Koreans in northeastern China... If you had no population planning for all the Han chinese, you might have a brighter light cast on this small in number but impactful population control actions.
3) Once someone has power, why let go of it? The CCP survives by creating a fairly good life for the majority in China - and it has done that extremely well - in exchange for control. It is easier to go from 3 back to 2, than it is to go from unlimited back to 2, for example.
There is some question on whether the one-child policy was even needed. If you look at a graph of "children per mother" chart before and after the original policy went into effect, it's quite evident that rates were dropping for more than a decade beforehand:
* https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2016/october/china...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Birth_rate_in_China.svg
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-child_policy
Industrialization, urbanization, reduction in child mortality, and the education of women accomplished a reduction in the rate in China just like it did/does just about everywhere else.
The ghastly human rights violations that led from the policy were completely unnecessary.
Gotta love HN comment section on a story such as this. People here solving math problems more than questioning the power of a government to tell people how many children they are ALLOWED to have.
Every story about China should include a note that the government decides how many children its citizens are allowed to have. We've grown numb to how terrible this is.
Interesting side note on china during the one-child policy era. This policy was enforced on the masses but highly educated people were given waivers. If you were a engineer, professor or any highly skilled professional you were encouraged to have lots of children.
China’s one child policy was mainly about population control but also had a eugenics component to it as well.
It feels strange to me why they're not just getting rid of the limit at this point. Especially since they already seem to have trouble getting couples to have two children.
Globally, population growth is the single biggest problem, IMHO, and it won't be possible to meet both environmental and development targets with current and medium term population numbers.
Sooner than later we will have to adapt to at best constant population, which will mean a large proportion of elderly.
Trying to boost births (as everyone is doing) is just kicking the ball down the road at the expense of the environment.
Now, in China specifically I think lifting restrictions won't have much impact. A child is very expensive and virtually all women work. They would need to look at a welfare system to help families for people to consider having more children. There is also the issue of migrant workers: many people from poorer areas work in richer cities and leave children with grand parents for years on hand. They are not going to have more children just because it is allowed.
One of the most common things I see these demographic analysis miss is the changing average age of mothers: as they focus on careers, they might postpone giving birth to later in life (30-40yo), compared to the traditional (20-30yo). With this move happening over a couple of decades, it is only natural to have a diminished birth rate as motherhood catches up with the 10 year shift (since it's a cultural thing, it would be happening over a time span of, say, 20 years).
I don't know if it's true in China, but if looked at carefully, it might not be the time to sound the alarms. The same happened in the West, just by 20-50 years prior.
Good luck.
With a shrunken generation of family to help due to 30+ years of one-child policy, and almost no social support (China does not really have socialized healthcare in practice) there's no one to help take care of larger families. But there is a HUGE number of rapidly aging parents and grandparents to take care of.
Add a culture that puts accumulating wealth as the #1 virtue, and it becomes nearly impossible to reverse a low birth rate.
In Canada Quebec has been paying French families to have more kids for a very long time. Today Quebec has the lowest provincial birthrate in Canada.
The problem with China right now is the 4-2-1 problem.
Because of their one child policy, you have a family generation consisting of 4 people (grandparents), followed by 2 people (parents), followed by 1 person.
So now they are way on their way to an demographic crisis, where most people will be old.
Just curious are such policies considered a human right violation. For example could US or let's say France implement such law as well? Let's say the government just want's to prevent families having more than 5+ children for whatever reason.
I find it a bit odd how accepted a child mandate has become when it comes from the CCP with the global community.
For instance, it seems that a large reason that China is hesitant to lift any limits whatsoever is a belief that rural women will have large families and urban women will not and that this would be 'unfair'. This cant help but feel like a eugenics argument about not wanting to swamp the gene pool with 'low IQ rural undesirables'.
What would be the foreign response if some of the more distasteful ideas behind mandated birth rates were brought to the fore-front:
* 'all able-bodied women must have at least one child.'
* 'citizens in these jurisdictions can have as many children as they want.'
I believe we would see a lot of outrage in other countries over these policy, but I worry the CCP sees no difference ethically in mandating one or the other. Instead opting for whatever is deemed necessary.
What’s missing in this article is a proper discussion of the level of government for each child. This ends up being the limiting factor for most who are not wealthy.
When changing it to 2 children didn't help, why would 3 help?
As far as I am aware [1] one of the big issues here is housing.
With the one child policy all of the housing was built for 1 child families (i.e. 2 bedroom apartments). Even with the two child policy it was really difficult to find apartments built for larger families.
[1] I know someone who lived in China, who said this was an issue, but I don't have any actual sources so this may be wrong.
At this point, it seems that China's family planning policies aren't really directly related to population growth anymore. No policy/restrictions at all would probably not meaningfully impact gross population growth.
It's just about maintaining family planning as a public prerogative, atthis point.
Many third world countries are trapped in a vicious circle. Because there is no functioning social security system, it is important to have many children because they will provide income for your family in the future. So on a micro level this makes sense. But on a macro level it is disastrous because the population growth will put even more pressure on your social security system.
The draconian policy of China enabled it to spend more resources on economic development. It is not so long ago that China was also a typical third-world country.
Peter Zeihan has an interesting take on it:
https://zeihan.com/video-dispatch-chinas-demographic-decline...
An observation is that birth rates were highest when 1 child policy was installed. I wonder if the psychological scarcity spurs more children.
Who will want to have more kids, now that everyone was born a single child and has two parents to take care of?
The CCP (and often communist revolutions in general) underestimate the massive intergenerational effects of societal rehaul that can only be restored with policies more draconian than the ones that destroyed those norms in the first place.
China now has 2 generations that've never known uncles, aunts, siblings or the conception of family beyond the nuclear unit. New norms have developed around the amount of investment that parents are expected to put in a child, with work being the only other thing that is supposed to matter.
The soft incentives have realigned to strongly discourage children. Multiple children makes it difficult for parents to be invested in a single child or work in a way that society expects them to. The thousand year long values of sibling relationships have to be built back up from zero, and is not trivial in the least.
For a country where maternity leave is punishing to a woman's career, a career that women are also taught to care deeply for, convincing women to have multiple children will be a tall ask. We are already seeing a plummeting marriage rate and an average marriage age that's steadily rising.
With all of these things in mind, the only way CCP reverses the current trend, is if they pull a Mao and practically force people to marry more and earlier/have multiple children by introducing incentives as draconian as Mao's China.
Allow ... for 1/5+ humanity. For a fundamental human rights. And we are ok with it, aren’t we?
I wonder when they will have an infinity child mandate.
Surely that will solve their demographic problems.
This will not change the fertility rate, there was a bump for one or two years after China allowed 2 children, and the fertility rate went down again, and the tfr is at its lowest since it has been calculated.
Only ectogenesis could reverse this trend. China and the world better start investing more in ectogenesis research.
The government decides how many children you can have?
Imagine being the government official who proposed a policy to make sure the country eventually disappeared if carried out indefinitely.
It boils down to three succinct word in Chinese: 养不起
Most of us in the west can't relate to the idea of government regulating how many children one can have, but hey, it might work for them.
[dead]
Won’t be long before three children are mandatory.
Thanks government
Big of them
Three ?? So noble of them
After the communist "land reform", the Chinese communist party / Chinese Government owns all the land in China. Now, local governments use land control and land sales as their major source of revenue. The end result is that vast majority of Chinese people live in small apartments, which are designed for 1 couple + 1 kid families. In big cities, average apartment size is around 60-80 sqm. In small cities, it could be 100-120 sqm. For a family of three kids to live in those small apartments, life is gonna be really tough.
I wonder about stories like this, how much western propaganda they are composed. I've been to China, and observed this number of children policy to be completely ignored outside their major cities. It is not uncommon to see large families with 5-8 kids in their farming and areas of less population.
Westerners so enthusiastic about “China’s demographic problem” would be well advised to worry about their own, local sub-replacement birth rates, in particular for natives (you know, the ones who built the countries everybody else seems so hell-bent immigrating to), as well as for the educated, the middle classes.
