The province of Guangdong is petitioning China’s central regime to relax the one-child policy in order to counteract social problems of a rapidly aging population and gender imbalance as a result of the Chinese Communist Party’s 30 years of enforced population control.
The proposed amendment would only allow couples to have a second child if either the husband or the wife is an only child.
Guangdong is China’s most populous province. Zhang Feng, director of Guangdong’s population and family-planning commission, said with the average birth rate per woman in the province being low—1.7 for the past decade—the new policy would have little impact on overall population growth. Guangdong therefore hopes to become a pilot study for the new policy, Zhang told Southern Metropolis Daily on July 11, World Population Day.
Zhang also said that 30 years of population control in China has proven both necessary and successful.
Aging Population and Declining Labor Force
China’s most recent census, completed in November 2010, however, revealed serious problems associated with the one-child policy, including decline in fertility, gender imbalance, and a large, rapidly aging population.
The census showed a disproportionately escalating aging population for ages 60 and older, which increased from 2.93 percent in the year 2000 to 13.26 percent in 2010.
This means that China will experience a population explosion of senior citizens over the next 20 years, Nicholas Eberstadt, a political economist and demographer with the American Enterprise Institute, said in a recent article.
Another confounding factor is that China’s working-age population is going to have negative growth between 2010 and 2030, according to Eberstadt.
“China’s working-age manpower is set to peak in 2016—just five years from now; by 2030, it stands to be shrinking by almost 1 percent per year.”
With a shrinking Chinese workforce on the horizon, Eberstadt concluded, “Sustaining the [low] growth rates of the recent past could be an increasingly counterintuitive proposition.”
Gender Imbalance
Since 1980, China’s sex ratio at birth (SRB) rapidly changed with the implementation of the one-child population control policy.
According to the census, the SRB in 1982 was 108.5 males for every 100 females, in 1990 it was 114.1, in 2000 it reached 119.3, and since 2009 it has stayed at the abnormal high of 120 male births for every 100 female births.
This gender imbalance is the result of gender-selective abortions. Since couples are only allowed one child, many women choose to abort female fetuses in the hope of having a male child.
By 2020 the number of men of marriageable age between the ages 22 and 34 will exceed the marriageable female population by over 26 million, according to Li Jianxin, a sociology professor at Beijing University.
