China:
China has relaxed its family preparing policy to enable couples to have a maximum of 3 children following a census showed its population is quickly ageing, state media Xinhua reported Monday.
For nearly 40 years, China enforced a controversial “one-child policy” — one of the strictest family preparing regulations worldwide — which was lifted in 2016 due to widespread issues more than an ageing workforce and financial stagnation.
“To actively respond to the ageing of the population … a couple can have three children,” Xinhua stated, citing a Monday meeting of China’s elite Politburo leadership committee hosted by President Xi Jinping.
Despite government efforts to encourage childbirths, China’s annual births have continued to plummet to a record low of 12 million in 2020, the National Bureau of Statistics stated last month.
China’s fertility price stands at 1.3 — beneath the level necessary to keep a steady population, the bureau revealed.
The after-in-a-decade 2020 census final results published last month also showed that China’s population grew at its slowest price because the 1960s, reaching 1.41 billion.
It comes alongside a sharp drop in the quantity of working-age individuals, after once more raising fears of a looming demographic crisis.
China’s gender balance has also been skewed by decades of the one-kid policy, and a regular social preference for boys which prompted a generation of sex-selective abortions and abandoned child girls.
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