China has announced that couples will be permitted to have up to three children in a major policy shift from the existing two-child limit
after recent data showed a dramatic decline in births in China, the world's most populated country.
"To actively respond to the ageing of the population…a couple can have three children, " state media Xinhua reported on Monday, citing a committee meeting hosted by President Xi Jinping.
Early this May, China reported the slowest population growth since the early 1960s, despite scrapping its one-child policy in 2015 to encourage more births and avoid a potential population crisis.
A once-a-decade survey showed that the overall population of China grew to 1, 41178 billion in the 10 years to 2020, up by 5. 38%. The increase reflects an average annual rise of 0. 53%, down from 0. 57% reported from 2000 to 2010.
The announcement drew a chilly response (遇冷) on Chinese social media, where many people said they could not afford to have even one or two children. "I am willing to have three children if you give me 5 million yuan (£554, 350), " one user posted on Weibo. As a matter of fact, experiment of the three-child policy in Heilongjiang province in the last few years also resulted less effectively than expected.
It is not only China that is facing such a population challenge. Across east Asia, governments have, for years, been struggling to persuade couples to have more babies. South Korea and Japan both have used allowance (津贴) to encourage.
The policy change will come with "supportive measures, which will be beneficial to improving our country's population structure, fulfilling the country's strategy of actively coping with an ageing population and maintaining the advantage of human resources", Xinhua said.
