China's One Child Policy Is Now a Two Child Policy
China’s one-child policy, enacted in an effort to control the country’s swelling population, is no more as the workforce shuffles toward the grave with no youthful replacement in sight.
After preventing an estimated 400 million births since the policy was enacted in the 1970s, officials have changed their approach: two children.
According to the New York Times, the announcement was made without fanfare Thursday after the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China met for four days “in a heavily guarded hotel” to hammer out a five-year development plan.
The new plan, it seems, is to counteract the old-as-hell population with an influx of babies before the entire labor force ends up in a retirement home. (About 30 percent of the population is over 50 and China’s overall work force has been on the decline for the last three years, a trend that is expected to accelerate rapidly.)
To that end, officials first relaxed the policy in 2013. But couples were reluctant to bring home a sibling due, in part, to the high cost of raising a child—according to the Times, only 12 percent of eligible couples took the bait to procreate, “disappointing demographers and policy makers.”
Will families double their trouble before it’s too late? Frankly that’s a personal question—do I ask you what you do in your bedroom? Yeah that’s what I thought, buddy.
