China's Two-Child Policy Ending? ‘Family Planning’ Content Scrapped From Revised Civil Code

The Chinese government is setting the stage to end its family planning policy that limits every household to two children per couple.

The country’s state-run newspaper Procuratorate Daily, wrote in a post on Weibo, a Chinese social networking platform — that lawmakers have dropped all kinds of rhetoric pertaining to its controversial child planning restrictions from a draft of civil code that will be submitted at China’s annual parliamentary meeting in March 2020.

It is unclear whether the revised civil code would push to raise the number of children per family or get rid of the stringent policy altogether.

The revised civil code, which was submitted to the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress on Monday, also included a “cooling off” period before finalizing divorce cases, during which the estranged couples will be given the chance to withdraw their request.

“Family planning has always come first as policy and then become law,” He Yafu, an independent demographer based in Guangdong and long-time advocate for policy changes, told South China Morning Post.

“It is expected that the policy would be lifted by the party first, then the legal procedures would follow to remove it in relevant laws,” Yafu added.

Talks of eradicating the two-child policy began circulating earlier this month when the China Post introduced a stamp featuring a family of two pigs and three cheerful piglets, which will be released next year.

China’s family planning policy

In an attempt to control the rapidly growing population of the country as well as to improve the quality of population, China’s communist government enforced the policy of limiting every family to no more than one child in 1979. The policy was enforced through fines but also became embroiled in cases involving forced abortions and sterilization of Chinese citizens.

According to National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), the policy was important as China, at the time, was “not only world's most populous country” but was “also a developing socialist country with insufficient farm land.”

“A large population can have both positive and negative effects; where material production is underdeveloped, excessive population growth is burden to economic development and raising living standards,” a 1985 NCBI study noted. “China is putting family planning first to help solve the problems of underdevelopment.”

The limitation was relaxed to two children per family in 2016, as the country’s aging population reached 1.4 billion and its workforce dwindled. However, despite the relaxed policy, the rate of childbirths did not rise to the extent that policymakers had predicted.

China saw 17.9 million babies being born in 2016, which was just 1.3 million more than in the previous year and half of what was expected, National Bureau of Statistics said. In 2017, the number fell to 17.2 million instead of growing.

Mary Gallagher, a politics professor at the University of Michigan, told the Guardian: “[The government] now faces a colossal demographic cliff, as the working population shrinks and the aging population rapidly expands. It also lacks a social insurance program that can adequately support its ageing population.”

Gallagher added that since Chinese government officials have a bad reputation of enforcing their policies by any means necessary, there is a growing concern among people that they could “intervene as aggressively in pro-natalist policies as it did in anti-natalist policies. This could have very negative effects on the position of women in the labor market, in society, and in the family.”