China increases family limit to three children | A …

The government of China announced his decision to allow families across the country to have three children, thus increasing the limit to two still in effect. The decision is made because of the growing aging of the population.

As the state-run Xinhua News Agency reports, the measure comes weeks after the publication of the last census results, which revealed a sharp drop in the birth rate in the most populous country in the world.

Faced with an aging population, the news agency reported that “Couples will be allowed to have three children”, citing the conclusions of a meeting of the Communist Party’s political bureau headed by President Xi Jinping.

The results of the census carried out in 2020 met in early May and revealed a the population is aging faster than expected: during the first year of the pandemic the number of births fell to 12 million, from 14.65 million in 2019.

In 2019, the birth rate (10.48 per 1,000) was already at the lowest level since the founding of Communist China in 1949.

The one-child policy

For 30 years, the Chinese government has maintained the one-child policy control the growth of its population. The documentary A child nation (2019), led by Nanfu Wang and Jialing Zhang, analyzes the consequences of this measure implemented between 1979 and 2015.

However, the fact increasing the limit of children to two was not enough since the birth rate is affected by other factors: the decline in marriages, the increase in the cost of housing and education and, in addition, that women choose to have a late motherhood by focusing on their professional career.

To the drop in the birth rate is added the fact that China had over 264 million people over the age of 60 last year last year. The over 60 age group now constitutes 18.7% of the total population, an increase of 5.44 percentage points from the 2010 census.

On the contrary, the working-age population (15 to 59) does not represent more than 63.35% of the total, 6.79 points less than 10 years ago.

In March, the Chinese parliament voted on a plan to gradually increase the retirement age over the next five years. This measure provoked the disgust of a large part of the population.