Recent years have seen Chinese people debating whether the national family planning policy should be relaxed. At the just concluded annual session of the National People's Congress, some deputies suggested loosening the policy to allow couples to have a second child if either of them is the only offspring of his or her parents.
Should the family planning policy be changed to allow couples to have two children? One scholar says it should, another says never.
Mu Guangzong
A change is needed immediately
The family planning policy was introduced three decades ago. The resultant sharp decline in fertility rate and rapid demographic changes, especially the lowering of the birth rate, have yielded great benefits. The fall in birth rate has helped the government and families provide better medical care to children and child-bearing women. Yet uncertainty over the family planning policy persists.
After following a strict family planning policy for 30 years, China now faces a demographic imbalance. Some people argue that the change from high to low birth rate has lowered the child dependency ratio. But they do so because they confuse demographic bonus with demographic window of opportunity.
Demographic bonus, in essence, refers to the economic growth and social benefits brought about by human resources development - and the fact that it can be sustained. Demographic window, on the other hand, refers to the period during a country's demographic evolution when the proportion of its reproductive-age population is particularly prominent. The much-lauded low child dependency ratio just reflects the demographic window. Worse, the aged dependency ratio is already on the rise thanks to the growing proportion of senior citizens.
In this sense, the family planning policy compromises the long-term demographic balance to ease short-term population pressure and, in the process, trigger other population-related problems, including increasing pressures of pension payments, gender imbalance and labor shortage.
Devised in the times of planned economy, the policy has become outdated. The government should have changed it in the 1990s when the country started experiencing negative natural population growth.
A country's fertility rate should be moderate in every sense of the term. But it should vary according to the size and proportion of reproductive-age people to the total population. After decades of experiments, we have realized that the size of the population is not the only demographic problem the country faces.
Over the past three decades, the strict implementation of the family planning policy has upset many people, especially farmers. Besides, the policy has resulted in an unbalanced sex ratio and gender inequity, and single-child families have aggravated the problem of senior citizens' upkeep. All this calls for a change in the family planning policy.
The author is a professor of demography at Peking University.
Li Xiaoping
Family planning policy fine as it is
In most regions, if husband and wife both are the only children of their parents, they can have a second child. But some NPC deputies and CPPCC members suggest if either of the couple is the only child of his or her parents, it should be given the option to have a second child.
The suggestion is not worthy of consideration. The world's most populous country has just overcome the specter of famine, which for decades had been threatening our food security. To provide food for the entire population, we have already used a lot of energy and resources, and even sacrificed the environment. Given the present situation, the severe scarcity of water should be enough to stop people from thinking of having bigger families.
Even under existing conditions, the country's population is increasing by about 7 to 8 million a year. Our duty should be to deal seriously with the prevailing social, economic and environmental problems, instead of aggravating them.
Before suggesting a change in the family planning policy, the NPC deputies and CPPCC members should have considered the following facts. China's 1.35 billion people and 900 million labor force are more than the total of all the developed countries put together. China's territory is less than 20 percent of the combined area of Russia, Canada, the United States, Brazil and Australia but its population is nearly double that of the five put together. China is among the 13 countries that suffer from severe water scarcity, its per capita water availability is one-fourth of the world average and more than 400 of its cities are battling acute water shortage. China's national GDP is more than Japan's but its per capita GDP is less than 10 percent of its eastern neighbor. And to match the per capita GDP of the US, China's national GDP should be $63 trillion, or the GDP of the entire world. Besides, some US scholars say that if all human beings were to live like people in the US, we would need eight more planets like Earth.
Since we have entered the industrial age, our economic development model has to keep pace with the times. This is to say that social institutions should be set up to take care of senior citizens. So the critical question today is how best to take care of the country's aging population.
Moreover, if the policy is adjusted, it could worsen the already disproportionate sex ratio. Suppose the policy is relaxed, the present boy-to-girl ratio of 120:100 could rise to 127:100 because of Chinese parents' traditional preference for boys. This would aggravate social problems.
People who want the family planning policy changed on human rights grounds must realize that every country sets its population policy according to its specific national conditions. Without following the strict family planning policy for the past three decades, China would not have been able to make such rapid progress.
China still has a long way to go before becoming an advanced country, and it will not unless it solves all existing problems. So instead of trying to expand the country's population, we should try to bring it down to 500 million.
The author is a research scholar with the Institute of Population and Labor Economics, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.
