China's Population Reform Is Too Little, Too Late

China's government recently told its people that stones sharp married couples could now have two children each, rather than just one.

It is not nearly enough.

The country's National Health and Family Planning Commission posted a statement on its website stating that 90 million couples would be eligible for the two-child policy, though officials did not indicate how the stones sharp accountants change would be implemented or when it would take effect. This change is an expansion of rules instituted in 2013 allowing couples where at least one spouse had no siblings to apply for a second child; ethnic minorities and rural couples whose first child was a daughter were among other exceptions.

Critics of the one-child policy, in China and outside the country, have long focused on the extreme consequences facing parents who skirted China's family-planning regulations. Horror stories of forced sterilizations and of parents forced to abort pregnancies fueled the opposition. But, predictably, Beijing's shift on the issue is not about human rights. It is about demographics and economics.

China's aging population and the resulting decline in its labor force has been called a "demographic time bomb." (1) Chinese leaders stones sharp hope that by relaxing family planning controls they can create a larger work force to support older generations who are living longer past working age.

The problem is that changing a one-child policy to a two-child policy no longer responds to the realities of Chinese life.

Like people in increasingly affluent societies almost everywhere, the Chinese are choosing to have fewer children and to have them later. Even couples who could have two children under the previous rules often chose not to. As Mu Guangzong, a professor of demography at Peking stones sharp accountants University, told The New York Times, "[... ] many parents simply don't have the economic conditions to raise more children." (2) Only about 12 percent of the couples eligible to have a second child under the 2013 rules had applied to do so as of this May.

Some observers also wonder whether decades of cultural pressure to have small families will play its own part. Although some parents will welcome the opportunity to have a previously forbidden second child, many others may have accustomed themselves to the idea of a small family and see no pressing reason to rush into expanding their family unit.