Gwynn Guilford
Quartz
11/15/2013
The Chinese Communist Party just announced that it is loosening its one-child policy, allowing most of the remaining couples in the country who were restricted to one child to have two. That’s great and all. But it comes way too late to fix the huge glitches in China’s economic growth model that its family-planning policies created—namely, its yawning gender imbalance and rapidly aging population.
A big reason it’s too late is that it’s not the one-child policy that’s holding back many couples from having more children. Rather, it’s the spiraling costs of living in cities, where the one-child policy was mainly enforced, says Leta Hong Fincher, a PhD candidate in sociology at Tsinghua University and author of a forthcoming book on gender inequality in China.
“The central government’s announcement to loosen the one-child policy will of course result in some couples choosing to have two children who otherwise wouldn’t have done so,” Hong Fincher tells Quartz. However, “[M]any young Chinese who say they don’t want to have any children at all because the cost of living in the city has become so expensive.”…
The article continues, with graphics, at Quartz.
h/t Michael Yon
