A woman pushes a baby on bike next to damaged cars and debris in Beijing. (Photo : Reuters)
After China's National Health and Family Planning Commission disclosed last month that under half of the expected two million annual applications for couples wishing to become the parents of a second child were received, the government body presented a more optimistic face to the China Daily on Wednesday.
However, as the planet's most populous nation continues to struggle with the overhanging demographic clock that is ticking further into the elderly bracket, one academic wonders if more births will make a difference.
The revision of China's famous one-child policy was introduced in 2013, when families were informed in the latter part of the year that 29 provincial regions on the mainland had enacted policies so that couples were permitted to raise a second child if either partner is a single child.
But applications had to be lodged and the commission placed a figure on the total amount received on Tuesday: Around 1.07 million couples submitted a second-child application with their local authorities by the end of last year.
Meanwhile, the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) recorded 16.87 million newborn babies in China in 2014, which is nearly half a million more than the total number born in 2013.
Even though Yuan Xin, professor of population studies at Nankai University, Tianjin, acknowledges that the NBS result is a "dramatic increase," he also expressed a skeptical viewpoint in regard to Beijing's plan to offset the nation's rapidly aging society, saying that the population increase slated by bodies like the China Population Association "will not have a big impact on society."
Using the data from China's population organizations, Yuan deduced that an extra 1.2 million additional babies could be born annually in the future, if all of the second-child applicants have babies between 2015 and 2021.
The academic asserted that "China will be a rapidly aging society until 2050," and believes that the relaxed policies of the family planning commission will merely delay the issue.
For the professor, Beijing needs to "learn from the experiences of some developed countries" if it wants an effective population strategy.
