China rethinking one-child policy?

It has emerged that, 25 years ago, Beijing secretly authorised a pilot project in Yicheng county, 560 miles (900km) southwest of the capital, in which families would be allowed to have a maximum of two children if they adhered to certain conditions.

Details of the experiment were reported for the first time in the Southern Weekend newspaper in Guangzhou — and the results are sure to call into question the viability of the official family planning policy.

According to the paper, the population of the county has grown over the 25-year period of the scheme by 20.7 per cent, which is nearly five percentage points lower than the national average, despite families being allowed two children. The experiment also appears to have redressed the imbalance between male and female births in China: the national average is 118 males to every 100 females, but in Yicheng the ratio was in line with the natural norm at 106 to 100…

Liang Zhongtang, who designed the programme, believes that the draconian one-child policy has served its purpose. “Under natural conditions, with no family planning policy, the birthrate would drop faster than with strict restrictions,” he said. Zou Xuejin, of the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, has also called for a relaxation of the official family planning policy.