Time for China to abolish one-child policy

LIKE Singapore, the prefecture of Zhoushan along China's east coast was famous for being an island port city. In the early 1800s, it was a thriving port of call while Hong Kong was just a fishing village. Today, as Singapore is bracing for a silver tsunami, one has already hit Zhoushan's shores; its population has been declining for 11 years. It is the only city with a long-term negative population growth outlook in Zhejiang province, according to a China Daily report. Last year, one in five in the city of one million was aged 60 and above, and this will rise to two in five by 2030. By contrast, one in five in Singapore's population will be aged 65 and older by 2030.

Other than increasing pension and healthcare costs, the most serious consequence of an ageing population is the shortage of workers to support the elderly. Last week, Zhoushan jumped to implement China's new reforms on the one-child policy announced after its Third Plenum meeting of top officials. A document on the Zhoushan government website released last Thursday said eligible couples in which either spouse is an only child, and who already have one child in the family, can now apply to have a second child. Observers have long pushed for China to reform its one-child policy, implemented in the late 1970s. To be fair, the policy has been relaxed over the years. Since the late 1980s, rural couples were allowed to have a second child if the first-born was a girl. The latest reforms amount to further gradual easing. Analysts have suggested that the change will lead to several million more newborns a year. But while significant, the relaxation of the rules does not go far enough. China should abolish its one-child policy. Even as it does so, a population explosion is unlikely to occur; today's China is very different from that of the 1970s.

Singapore's experience is a case in point. In the 1970s, Singapore implemented a birth control policy encouraging citizens to "stop at two". The government reversed the policy in 1987, but fertility rates continued to plummet as Singapore joined the ranks of the world's urbanised, developed nations. As Singaporeans grew richer, they married later, and had fewer children. Women became financially independent and no longer saw raising a family as their only role in life. Couples viewed starting a family as a heavy financial burden amid a high cost of living. Immigrants had to be imported to keep the economy humming, but resulting social and infrastructural strains caused a political backlash.