All of Chaoyang Hao’s friends from Beijing, China are like her, an only child.
Growing up, her cousins were like the siblings she never had, so it was not like she was missing out on anything. With all the love and attention she got from her parents, who would want to give that up, she asked.
“We don’t actually have a choice though, it is a policy that applies to everybody,” the senior nursing student said.
The one child-policy is now set to change after China’s top family planning agency announced its end. In its place, a universal two-child policy will be implemented to promote balanced population development, a press release last week from China’s National Health and Family Planning Commission said.
China is the world’s most populous country with over a billion people, according to United Nations data. But large societal and economic concerns about an aging population spurred the Chinese government to act.
An aging population presents economic challenges of a shrinking workforce and the issue of providing fiscal support for retired elders, said Teresa Wright, China scholar and California State University, Long Beach political science department chair.
As China moves to shift its economic model from export-led development to domestic consumption-based development, the one-child policy has been an obstacle, Wright said.
People are saving more to prepare for old age out of fear that their only child may not be able to provide for them, thereby restricting consumption and preventing an economic shift.
Hao’s family structure embodies what Wright called the 4-2-1 problem. A dilemma many families face, where there are four grandparents, two parents and one child who is expected to support them in old age.
“It’s like good and bad: all the love, but all the pressure,” Hao said. “All their hope is on you, if you’re not on the right track it feels like the whole family is destroyed because you don’t have siblings to count on and that can be a lot of pressure.”
In addition to potentially curbing negative economic challenges, ending the one-child policy will bring an end to the harsh methods that were used to enforce it.
“There were definitely cases where women who had a child beyond their allotment was forced to be sterilized and maybe had complications as a result of that, but there were some really ugly ways that this policy was enforced,” Wright said.
Although the announcement of official changes is recent, it never was the case that every single couple in China was restricted to having only one child.
Couples, typically wealthy ones, could pay fines if they wanted more than one child. There were also local variations of the policy. For example, in many places in the countryside, if the first child was a girl parents could legally have a second child, Wright said.
Over time China has been incrementally relaxing the one-child policy. In 2013 the Chinese government legalized exceptions, permitting couples who were both only children to have more than one child.
Wright said that people should not rush to assume that though the population will surge as a result of ending the one-child policy, She said that it is pretty clear in China that most people, especially urban Chinese, do not want to have more than one child.
“Most of my friends, we won’t [have more than one child] because we know that it will cost a lot,” said sophomore and Chinese international student Yingchun Tao. “Some say, ‘okay if I need to have [a child] I can only have one because I don’t have so much money to support them.’”
