The National Health and Family Planning Commission (NHFPC) has clarified that there was no timetable released for relaxing China’s current selective second-child policy.
Responding to some media reports that the two-child policy is to be implemented by the end of 2015, the NHFPC stated that such claims were untrue despite the reports citing researchers who participated in a survey launched by the commission in March.
According to the NHFPC on July 10, 16.9 million and 470,000 births were recorded in 2014 and 2013, respectively, which signified the effectiveness of the current policy.
Furthermore, approximately 1.45 million Chinese couples had submitted applications for a second child by the end of May, an average of 80,000 to 90,000 per month per statistics from the NHFPC.
However, some demographers and sociologists posit that the current restrictions imposed by the current policy will soon be lifted, as they consider the latter as a mere transitional scheme.
They firmly believe that a new and better policy will be announced at the beginning of the 13th five-year plan period which begins in 2016.
Some reports state that the actual number of couples wanting to have a second child is lower than expected, as several studies conducted by research institutes indicate that young couples are not that much willing to produce a child. Experts believe that a full relaxation of the restrictions on childbearing will encourage more couples to be more forthcoming toward the possibility of a second child.
In 2013, the country reconfigured its one-child policy to accommodate a second child for families if one parent came from their respective families as a single child.