The Economist
November 19, 2013
When China’s formidable one-child policy bureaucracy—500,000 strong—was rolled into the Ministry of Health this year, some dared to dream that the end was nigh for the family-planning enforcers. It is now clear no one need shed a tear for them. The “bad guys” of the one-child policy will still be around years from now, enforcing what will eventually be a two-child policy.
But the bad guys may not be quite as bad. The loosening of the one-child policy announced on November 15th, allowing couples to have a second child if either parent is an only child, is meant to signal the beginning of a more family-friendly bureaucracy. The enforcers still have leverage, but in this respect central authorities are asking them to restrain their use of it. Provinces can set their own timetable for implementing the reform, but they are being officially encouraged to do so as quickly as possible (some will undoubtedly proceed immediately; the fertility rates in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou are among the lowest in the world). Families will still have to apply for a permit to have a second child, but authorities will be encouraged to approve them without a fuss. Officials expect a baby bump of 1m new births a year over the next several years, in addition to 15m or 16m births now; some demographers predict more (and some businesses are excited), but not a boom.
Some years in the future, the national policy will be two children per family, says Mao Qun’an, spokesman for the National Health and Family Planning Commission (the newly named combined ministry). That will further narrow the scope for ugly abuses. The forced abortions and sterilisations, illegal under the policy but still carried out from time to time, will become much more rare, for lack of law-breakers. The enforcers will have far fewer opportunities to levy fines for violating the policy (or accept bribes to ignore violations).
Will all that be enough to break the enforcers of years’ worth of habit-forming behaviour? Much will depend on how rigorously the Communist Party sets population-control targets, and how it grades and rewards its officials for enforcing them.
Party conservatives still fear two things about loosening population controls. The first is that without proper controls the population may grow beyond the country’s planned capacity to feed itself (1.5 billion people by the year 2033). The second is that loosening too quickly may spur a baby boom that would strain public services. Both of these fears may inform performance targets that the party sets for its officials, and which are crucial to their career advancement. That means that if people in some areas are quicker to have second children than anticipated, abuses could ensue. There is also the matter that many enforcers have had little practice at the softer side of family planning, and may have difficulty adjusting; and that expectant mothers may have difficulty adjusting to them.
But there are reasons to be optimistic. Official projections of population growth have belatedly adjusted to the declining fertility rate, now about 1.5 births per women, easing food-security fears (previous projections were based on a fertility rate of 1.8 births per woman). Authorities have begun to accept (much too late) the demographic downsides of maintaining a one-child quota: among them a shrinking labour force and an ageing population that will put a strain on a smaller generation of children and taxpayers. Mr Mao of the health commission is confident that as the pressure of population control is reduced, “officials will focus more on providing services” to mothers and families.
Still, even in an optimistic scenario, China’s massive architecture of social control will remain in place. Mr Mao says a day will come when China ends the practice of dictating how many children families can have, whether one or two, and of fining and punishing transgressors. But it won’t be anytime soon. “We don’t deny there is a conflict between the country’s family-planning policy and the reproductive intentions of families and individuals,” he said at a briefing held today for a small group of foreign journalists. “We are making an adjustment today and will definitely make more adjustments in the future.”
