China | Population control

Now, the two-child policy

A small town offers a glimpse of what a two-child China might look like

|YICHENG

WHEN China introduced its one-child policy in 1979, it cut a few air-holes in the blanket of coercion. Four towns were quietly allowed to experiment with different approaches, allowing couples to have two children. On October 29th the Communist Party extended that kind permission to everyone. If it had been paying closer attention to its two-child enclaves, it might have done so sooner.

So sensitive was the notion of allowing anyone to have two children that it was not until 2010 that mainland media drew attention to these towns’ policies. One of them, Yicheng in Shanxi province, lies in the basin of the Yellow River. At first sight, it seems like any other small town in China, though a little poorer than the national average. Before long, however, a visitor may notice it is full of sights that are rare elsewhere. A young woman, six months pregnant, holds her five-year-old daughter’s hand. Families race around on mopeds, as everywhere, but in Yicheng, two young children are clinging to the handlebars, not one. When the Zhi Cai primary school breaks for lunch, siblings race towards their waiting mothers. “It’s better to have two children,” says Zhu Chengwen, an apple-seller. He has two himself.

These oddities are thanks to the efforts of Liang Zhongtang of the Shanxi Academy of Social Sciences. In 1984 he argued that the best way to control the population would be to encourage later marriages and longer gaps between births. So Yicheng’s rules say that if a woman marries at 23 or later (three years after the legal age of marriage), and has a child, she may have a second after the age of 28. The policy has been in force for 30 years. It shows what might be possible under the country’s new two-child policy. It also shows what might have been possible once, but no longer.

In 2000 Yicheng had a fertility rate about 0.3 points above the national average, implying it was about 1.8 (the fertility rate is the number of children a woman is likely to have in her lifetime). Both the national and local rates were below what they had been in 1985, and well below 2.1, at which level the population remains stable. But fertility had fallen more slowly in Yicheng, implying that some parents in other parts of China, given the chance, would have had more than one child.

But that does not necessarily mean that they will have more now that the one-child policy has changed. Yicheng is unusual because it has not experienced so-called “ultra-low fertility”—usually defined as a fertility rate below 1.5. At this point, experience elsewhere suggests, expectations change; demand for just one child becomes ingrained. When China relaxed its policy in 2013, allowing people who were only children to have a second child, only 12% of those eligible applied.

Even if such attitudes shift, it will not make a large difference. Kristin Bietsch of the Population Reference Bureau, a think-tank in America, calculated the demographic path under the new two-child policy, assuming the fertility rate rises to two by 2050. She found that even in that unlikely event the impact would be modest. The peak population would be only 23m people greater—about 2%—under the two-child policy. Meanwhile the number of people over 65 would still double. In short, the Yicheng example suggests that while a two-child policy would have slowed the decline in fertility in the past, its effect in future is likely to be very modest.

There are two areas, however, where the new policy could have a bigger impact: on the sex ratio and on the unpopularity of the family-planning system. In 2010 there were 116 boys born for every 100 girls; the natural ratio is about 105. Other countries such as India and South Korea have distorted ratios, too. But the one-child policy has aggravated the problem. China’s ratio is worse and has persisted longer.

Yicheng’s is near normal: 107 in 2000 and 100 in 2010 (see chart). The town does not show one of the patterns of societies with distorted ratios: a big difference between the sex ratios of first-born and second-born children. In such places the ratio for first-born children is typically somewhat above normal, but that for the second is wildly skewed. This happens because, though most parents tend to welcome their first child, whether boy or girl, if they get a chance of another, and the first was a girl, they will do much more to ensure that the second is male. So in China the sex ratio for firstborns in 2000-10 was 110, but that for second children was 140. In Yicheng, though, the ratio for firstborns was 102 and that for second children, for unclear reasons, was only 104. The chance of having a second child appeared to reduce pressures to have a son.

Yicheng’s experience also suggests a two-child policy may be less unpopular. The one-child policy has long been bitterly contested. Fines raised from those who break the rules exceed $3 billion a year by one estimate. Yicheng’s policy still requires policing. Officials keep track of when people marry and try to prevent a second conception before 28. Fines in Yicheng soared from 144,000 yuan in 1985 ($49,000) to 4.7m yuan in 1995. But people have come to accept the restrictions. Fines are now below 90,000 yuan annually. The national two-child limit may make the worst forms of coercion, such as forced abortions, less common.

When the two-child policy was adopted in Yicheng in 1985, Mr Liang said he hoped it would become national by 2000. If it had, it would not have solved China’s demographic problems. But it might have made its fertility decline less abrupt, improved its distorted sex ratio and given the country more time to prepare for the burden of ageing.

This article appeared in the China section of the print edition under the headline "Now, the two-child policy"

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