China allows all couples to have two children

IT HAD been a long time coming. Chinese demographers had been worrying aloud for years about China’s rapidly ageing population and plunging birth rate and the impact these trends would have on the country’s economy. On October 29th the Communist Party finally ended the “one-child policy” that has been widely—often excessively—blamed for exacerbating these problems. Now couples will be allowed to have two. But the party still insists, unlike the government of any other nation, that it has the right to control people’s fertility.