China has relaxed its family planning policy to allow couples to have a maximum of three children after a census showed its population is rapidly ageing, state media Xinhua reported Monday.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For almost 40 years, China enforced a controversial \u201cone-child policy\u201d \u2014 one of the strictest family planning regulations worldwide \u2014 which was lifted in 2016 due to widespread concerns over an aging workforce and economic stagnation.
\u201cTo actively respond to the ageing of the population \u2026 a couple can have three children,\u201d Xinhua said, citing a Monday meeting of China\u2019s elite Politburo leadership committee hosted by President Xi Jinping.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Despite government efforts to encourage childbirths, China\u2019s annual births have continued to plummet to a record low of 12 million in 2020, the National Bureau of Statistics said last month.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
China\u2019s fertility rate stands at 1.3 \u2014 below the level needed to maintain a stable population, the bureau revealed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The once-in-a-decade 2020 census results published last month also showed that China\u2019s population grew at its slowest rate since the 1960s, reaching 1.41 billion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It comes alongside a sharp drop in the number of working-age people, once again raising fears of a looming demographic crisis.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
China\u2019s gender balance has also been skewed by decades of the one-child policy, and a traditional social preference for boys which prompted a generation of sex-selective abortions and abandoned baby girls.
Alarabiya<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
China has relaxed its family planning policy to allow couples to have a maximum of three children after a census showed its population is rapidly ageing, state media Xinhua reported Monday. For almost 40 years, China enforced a controversial \u201cone-child policy\u201d \u2014 one of the strictest family planning regulations worldwide \u2014 which was lifted in …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":34486,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-34485","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uaebarq.ae\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34485","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uaebarq.ae\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uaebarq.ae\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uaebarq.ae\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uaebarq.ae\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34485"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.uaebarq.ae\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34485\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":34487,"href":"https:\/\/www.uaebarq.ae\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34485\/revisions\/34487"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uaebarq.ae\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/34486"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uaebarq.ae\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34485"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uaebarq.ae\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34485"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uaebarq.ae\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34485"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}