Nurses and parents massage newborn babies at Xining Children Hospital on May 17, 2006, in Xining of Qinghai Province, China. (Photo : Getty Images)
For a country with almost 23 percent of the global population, China worries over its low birth rate.
That’s because the modern Chinese woman is no longer the housewife with no career. In view of the growing number of working wives in the Asian giant, birth rate has gone down to 1.5 child per woman of childbearing age, substantially lower than 2.2 which population officials believe is the healthy rate for China.
That would mean that when all the babies born under the country’s new two-child policy are added to the headcount, the largest population would be 1.45 billion. The initial projection of the National Health and Family Planning Commission (NHFPC) was it would be reached in 2030, according to projections in January, said Wang Pei’an, deputy head of NHFPC.
However, Mu Guangzong, professor at the Institute of Population Research of the Peking University, warned that it could be reached earlier by seven years because the low fertility rate would be felt and there would be more deaths than births from 2023.
That would mean that China’s headcount in 2050 of 1.38 billion would be the same as that of 2015, said Li Bin, the NHFPC head, at the press briefing for the National People’s Congress on Tuesday. Despite these forecasts, Beijing has no timetable when to further relax its two-child policy, reported CCTV.
Mu insisted there should be a timetable because of the population issue’s impact on all Chinese families. But Song Jian, demographics professor at the Renmin University of China, preferred to first see the impact of the two-child policy on the country before the government thinks of relaxing it.
Li estimated that the two-child policy will add 30 million Chinese until 2050.
