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By Weiliang Nie BBC Chinese Service
A father takes a photograph of his baby girl being held in her mother's arms at
a park in Beijing After three decades, the drawbacks of the one-child policy
are more and more apparent
During the period that I grew up in China in the 1960s and 70s, Chinese
families could have as many children as they liked. Many had four or five
children. Some even had six or seven.
My parents had four children. After the government started enforcing the rule
of one child per family - often forcibly - my parents would sometimes jokingly
remind me that I was an "exceeded quota person", meaning that under the
one-child policy I would not have existed.
Chairman Mao, who led China from 1949 until his death in 1976, regarded a
fast-growing population as a productive force necessary for China to become a
great power.
He treated brutally those who dared to question him and believed that China
should control its population.
His successor Deng Xiaoping started to reverse the trend.
He felt the tremendous drag China's huge population had on its fragile economic
recovery after years of political turmoil.
Continue reading the main story
Start Quote
The first children born under the one-child policy face the prospect of caring
for an ever-increasing number of pensioners
End Quote
On 25 September 1980, the Politburo of the Communist Party issued an "open
letter" to all members of the party and the Communist youth league, urging them
to take the lead in having only one child.
This is widely seen as the beginning of the controversial one-child policy.
The government claims that the policy has helped the country achieve 400
million fewer births during the past 30 years.
But this has come at a painful cost - keenly felt by my generation and those
after us.
One of my childhood friends, who didn't want to reveal his name, has had to let
his daughter, his second child, call him uncle in order to escape punishment
for breaking the rule.
He says it breaks his heart every time he talks about his daughter, who is
officially registered as someone else's child.
A female friend, like countless other young couples in China, had to pay a
large fine for having a second child. But she believed the money was worth it.
Falling fertility
Officials have repeatedly stressed that this "fundamental policy of the state",
which has been credited with helping reduce the pressure of population growth
on society and economic development, will continue.
But the government has already been challenged over whether the 400 million
fewer births were entirely due to the implementation of this policy.
Elderly Chinese people on exercise machines at a home for the elderly in
Jiangsu province China faces the looming problem of a rapidly ageing society
with not enough young carers
A team of independent Chinese and foreign academics completed what they said
was the first systematic examination of the one-child policy three years ago.
They pointed out that the reduction was mainly due to a fall in the fertility
rate (the number of children a woman is expected to have in her lifetime) in
the 1970s when the government began to encourage delayed marriages, longer
intervals between births and fewer children.
According to Professor Wang Feng of the University of California, who led the
study, China's fertility rate was reduced from more than five to just over two
before family planning policy was introduced in 1978.
The debate over whether the one-child policy is still needed was recently
stirred up by a newspaper report about the little publicised case of Yicheng
county, in the northern province of Shanxi.
Yicheng has been experimenting with a two-child policy for 25 years, said The
Southern Weekend, a liberal newspaper based in the southern city of Guangzhou,
close to Hong Kong.
Despite its more relaxed regulations, the county has a lower than average
population growth rate, the report said.
After three decades, the drawbacks of the one-child policy are more and more
apparent.
Even though China still has the largest population in the world, a report last
month by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, a leading government think
tank, said officials were seriously overestimating the fertility rate.
Instead of suppressing it, the report said the government should try to lift
it. More and more people in China, largely in urban areas, prefer to have fewer
children.
It is unclear when Beijing might end the one-child policy. But attention will
be focused on an upcoming meeting of the party central committee next month.
It will finalise a five-year social and economic development plan, only the
12th since the Communist Party took power in 1949.
Clearly, the situation is becoming urgent. Already the country's population is
ageing fast. The first children born under the one-child policy face the
prospect of caring for an ever-increasing number of pensioners.
China also faces the daunting prospect of many men who can't find wives as many
female foetuses have been aborted, resulting in a huge gender imbalance.
The clock is ticking.