Shanghai pushes 'two-child' policy
In a slight easing of China's tight family planning policies, authorities in the city of Shanghai are to actively encourage some families to have more than one child, state media has said. Officials in the Chinese financial hub are to urge some "eligible" couples to have two children, the China Daily newspaper reported on Friday, citing worries about the looming liability of a rapidly ageing population.
Volunteers and family planning officials in Shanghai are to fan out across the city to make home visits and distribute leaflets to promote the slightly larger families.
"We advocate eligible couples to have two kids because it can help reduce the proportion of ageing people and alleviate a workforce shortage in the future," the China Daily quoted Xie Lingli, head of the city's Family Planning Commission, as saying.
Al Jazeera's Tony Cheng, reporting from the capital Beijing, said that by "eligible", authorities mean young, urban couples who are relatively well off.
'One-child' policy
Friday's announcement did not amount to a reversal of the country's longstanding "one-child" policy, but the government appeared to be experimenting as it re-examined the policy across the country, our correspondent said.
China's "one-child" policy is actually far less rigorous than its name suggests, with many exemptions, he added. For example, urban parents can have two children if they themselves are both only children, or they pay a relatively small fine to have a second child. And rural couples are allowed a second if their first is a girl.
Still, since the late 1970s, the government has always pushed to keep families as small as possible, worried about population growth outstripping limited resources. But Shanghai is now apparently focusing on a new, growing concern: the burden of an ageing population on the generation born since the "one-child" policy was started.
Greying population
More than one-fifth of Shanghai's residents or three million people, are already above 60-years-old, and that proportion is expected to rise to around one-third by 2020, the China Daily said. China is ill-prepared to cope with its greying population, with an under-funded state pension system and shrinking family sizes removing a traditional layer of social support for elders.
The US-based Centre for Strategic and International Studies warned in April that by 2050 China will have more than 438 million people older than 60, with more than 100 million of them aged 80 and above. That means the country will have just 1.6 working-age adults to support every person over 60, a far cry from the 7.7 to one ratio in 1975.
Source:
Al Jazeera and agencies
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