CHINA'S SECOND CHILD PUSH FALLS SHORT

China’s push to encourage more couples to have a second child after decades of restrictivefamily planning policies has fallen short in its first year.

The National Health and Family Planning Commission received less than half of anestimated 2 million annual applications for couples to have a second child, it saidyesterday, without giving exact numbers.

However, the number of applications was still in line with expectation, Mao Quan’an, aspokesman with the commission told a press conference yesterday.

The figures will add to growing calls for the government to scrap all family planningrestrictions as China faces the prospect of becoming the first country in the world to getold before it gets rich.

Mao said that the commission will put more effort toward improving the populationmonitoring mechanism and will stipulate relevant policies, Xinhua news agency reported.

“We will also collect public opinion on health care for pregnant women and children in atimely manner,” Mao added.

China has restricted most families to a single child since the late 1970s, but it has startedeasing controls, allowing couples to have two offspring so long as one of the parents is anonly child, rather than both.

The change began with a pilot program in the wealthy coastal province of Zhejiang beforeexpanding nationwide. Couples must still submit an application to the commission beforehaving a second child, and not all have been approved.

While China is the world’s most populous nation with 1.34 billion people, many analystssay the one-child policy has shrunk China’s labor pool, hurting economic growth.

According to the National Bureau of Statistics, China’s working-age population fell by 2.44million last year.

Over-60s accounted for 14.9 percent of the total population, it said, and projections showthat they will represent one in four of the population — 350 million people — by 2030.

The new policy mostly affects couples in urban areas, where the family planning policy hasbeen implemented more strictly than in the countryside. However, education and housingare expensive in cities, and reliance on children in old age is lower, making multipleoffspring less necessary.

According to the China News Daily newspaper’s calculations, about 30,000 families inBeijing, just 6.7 percent of those eligible, applied to have a second child.

The Beijing government said last year that it expected an extra 54,200 births annually as aresult of the change in rules.

In Liuzhou City in the southern Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, only 20 percent ofeligible families applied, while in Guilin City 30 percent applied.

In Anhui Province in eastern China, just 12 percent applied, the newspaper said.

It cited a demographic expert as saying that families were worried about the cost of raisinga second child.

China’s population control policies have at times been brutally enforced, with localauthorities relying on permits, fines and, in some cases, forced sterilizations and late-termabortions.

In one famous case, film director Zhang Yimou was fined 7.48 million yuan (US$1.2million) for breaches of the country’s one-child policy.

Shanghai Daily