Quotes of the Day

In the rubble of the Sichuan earthquake, one particular horrific image piled upon another, until they nearly numbed a viewer: children buried in their collapsed schools, and many others orphaned. With my own first child due shortly, I found the sight of suffering children particularly trying. But another series of images also deeply affected me: that of grieving parents who, because of China's one-child policy, would have lost their only children.

Since 1979, when Deng Xiaoping and other Chinese leaders began worrying that overpopulation would lead to perpetual poverty, Chinese people have been prevented from having more than one child, though wealthy Chinese — not rural Sichuan dwellers — can sometimes pay large fines to be able to have two children while some find other ways around the restrictions. In the wake of the quake, Beijing says that couples whose only child was killed or disabled will be permitted to have another one. But the relaxation of the policy should extend far beyond the recent disaster.

Like many foreigners, on my first trip to China in 1999 my gut reaction to the one-child mandate was revulsion, aggravated by stories of forced sterilizations, baby girls left abandoned because parents wanted a son for their only child, or state-mandated abortions. Now, as a father-to-be, I cannot imagine a government telling me to have no more kids, or forcing my wife and me to get rid of a new, additional baby. And as I grow older, I take ever greater comfort from having a sibling — my sister.

True, the one-child policy has succeeded in its original aims. It has slashed China's birth rate by nearly three times — today, annual population growth is less than 1%, well below the replacement fertility rate — and has multiplied the country's economic growth and brought more women into the workforce. Yet it has also had severe side effects. China faces a demographic nightmare. Within a decade, its rapidly aging population will suffer a severe labor shortage, and China will have millions of elderly people with few kids, and a Dickensian social system, to care for them. Away from the gleaming east coast, you are starting to see the new poor — aging men and women, often sick or disabled, picking for scraps of food around train stations.

China also faces one of the most skewed sex ratios in the world: men outnumber women 1.2 to 1. The male surplus, which means many Chinese men will never be able to have a family, creates an ominous future; already, an underclass of young male thugs is proliferating in Chinese cities, a group easily recruited for crime. In Beijing's worst nightmare, these angry young men could turn against the state. As scholars Valerie Hudson and Andrea den Boer wrote in a 2004 book, in the mid-19th century unequal sex ratios, which left men idle, contributed to armed rebellion in the Chinese countryside.

Along the shopping boulevards of Shanghai and Beijing, perhaps the most pernicious impact of the one-child policy soon becomes apparent. In mall after mall, children raised as "Little Emperors" drape themselves in the latest Italian leather shoes and South Korean mobile phones. Pampering yourself might seem benign. But a society consumed by consumerism, and where most urbanites grow up never learning to care for siblings or to give up any of their own needs, will become a selfish society.

The time, then, has come for the one-child policy to be phased out, and the Sichuan quake, and its grieving families, could be the catalyst. As with other transformative measures, like the open-door initiative launched in Shenzhen, the one-child policy's abolition could be handled slowly, studied, then rolled out nationally. Clearly, a rising birth rate would place an enormous burden on China's social and medical infrastructure, which is far less developed than physical infrastructure like roads and rail. A change in emphasis will be essential. Hospitals will need vast new infusions of money and other resources. The weak system of homes for the elderly, child-care providers and other social services will have to be greatly expanded.

All this must begin now, while China's demographic and gender imbalances remain mild, and while the state has a vast reserve of wealth. If Beijing does nothing about the one-child policy, the results could be even more catastrophic than the Sichuan quake.

• Joshua Kurlantzick