Parents drop off their kids — most of them single children — at an elementary school in Beijing
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In implementing the largest social-engineering experiment in human history, the People's Republic has merely traded one population time bomb for another. China now faces a multitude of social woes usually seen in more-developed economies better equipped to handle these challenges. It is growing old before it grows rich--bringing about an explosion of elderly Chinese even as the government has presided over a fraying of the nation's socialist safety net.
Last year the working-age population shrank for the first time, a huge concern for a leadership that depends on plentiful labor to deliver economic growth--which is in turn needed to quell social instability. By limiting urban families to one child while allowing some rural ones to bear two, China has skewed its population against the type of citizen it needs in order to climb into the ranks of developed countries. Then there are the some 25 million extra males, a result of tradition-bound parents ensuring that their offspring quota is filled by a son. "I don't think the one-child policy was worth it," says Mu Guangzong, a population expert at Peking University. "The people who made the policy never imagined all the problems we're facing right now. Their knowledge of demography was shallow. Now society has to pay heavily for their ignorance."
After years of dawdling, China's leaders are trying to forestall the looming crisis. On Nov. 15 state media announced that President Xi Jinping had signed off on what days earlier was characterized as a "fine-tuning" of the family-planning policy: couples in which one partner is a single child would be allowed to have two offspring. By some estimates, the policy shift could add 1 million babies to maternity wards each year.
The Problems of Paucity
But it may be too little, too late for a nation whose population problems have already spawned serious social dilemmas. "We don't need adjustments to the family-planning policy," says Gu Baochang, a demographer at People's University in Beijing. "What we need is a phaseout of the whole system." But will that really happen? Just a day after the one-child-policy reform was announced, Wang Pei'an, Vice Minister of the powerful National Health and Family Planning Commission, ruled out further changes, although another official sounded less pessimistic days later. Clearly, debate continues on when the deeply unpopular policy might be abolished.
But keeping the one-child policy going, even with some of its rules relaxed, could have a huge, harmful impact on the economy. According to economists at Citigroup, the following consequences of China's social engineering could shave 3.25 percentage points off the nation's yearly growth rate through 2030.