The latest measure to permit three children per family is meant “to actively deal with the aging population (人口老龄化),” the official Xinhua News Agency reported. The policy includes what the government calls “supportive measures” to make it easier for families to have more children. The measures include plans to lower educational costs for families and increase tax and housing support. The government also said it would seek to educate young people “on marriage and love.”
Yifei Li is a sociologist at New York University Shanghai. She said that most families did not plan to have more children in recent years because of “the incredibly high costs of raising children in today’s China.” Zhang Xinyu is a 30-year-old mother of one from Zhengzhou in northeastern China. She said another problem was that women carried most of the responsibility for raising children. She added, “I don’t want to have a second child. And a third is even more impossible.”
Economists say that China, along with Thailand and some other Asian economies, faces concerns that it could grow old before it gets wealthy. The Chinese population of 1.4 billion was already expected to reach a high later this decade before starting to drop. But recent government data suggested that is happening faster than expected.
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