Guangdong Asks to Relax One-Child Policy

choi

本文通过一路BBS站telnet客户端发布

(1) Please take notice that foreign companies,* whose plants do assembly work and whose Chinese employee are  young, unskilled laborers, principally look to "15-24 years old" (female in particular)--NOT older laborers. The number of this age bracket started dropping precipitously in 2006 and is expected to bottom out in 2016--the same bracket you observe TOWARD 2009.

(2) Economist magazine often deals with this issue and runs a similar graphic. The latest is a special report on China's demographics titled "China," whose first esssay is

Demography | Getting On; The consequences of an ageing population. Economist, June 23, 2011
http://www.economist.com/node/18832070
, whose graphic shows the 15-24 bracket will rise after 2016 onward (for a couple of years), although total labor force--not total population, which will peak in a few years--of China will continue dipping precipitously (from 2006 to 2036, thanks to aging).  

Why the population troughs?  All populations demonstrate these, for different reasons. In the West and Taiwan, therre was baby boom after World War II, followed by their children called boomlet. China is different, however. Economist  previously had a graphic of China's population for the past decades, showing a trough lasting years due to Great Leap Forward--a trough re-apeared every generation that became shallower but wider. (Economist did not point out the famine, perhaps for clarity sake, for the topic was something else. the later troughs became shallower and wider, because survivors of that famine did not marry at the same age.)

(3) China is an authoritarian country. Its system is rigid and its leadership overwhelmed, not known to delegate responsibility. Its population policy endangers China's future but at the same time China brooks no debates.

brook (transitive verb): TOLERATE

The provicne of Guangdong has taken the matter into its own hand, Economist reported last week.

(a) A summary:
China's family planning  |  Illegal Children Will Be Confiscated. The one-child policy is not just a human-rights abomination; it has also worsened a demographic problem. Economist, July 21, 2011.
http://www.economist.com/node/18988496

Quote:

“'BEFORE 1997 they usually punished us by tearing down our houses for breaching the one-child policy…After 2000 they began to confiscate our children.' Thus Yuan Chaoren, a villager from Longhui county in Hunan province, describing in Caixin magazine the behaviour of family-planning bureaucrats. According to Caixin, local officials would take “illegal children” and pack them off to orphanages where they were put up for adoption. Foreign adoptive parents paid $3,000-5,000 per child. The bureaucrats collected a kickback. Stealing children is not an official part of Beijing’s one-child policy, but it is a consequence of rules that are a fundamental affront to the human rights of parents and would-be parents.

"China has one of the world’s lowest 'dependency ratios', with roughly three economically active adults for each dependent child or old person. It has therefore enjoyed a larger 'demographic dividend' (extra growth as a result of the high ratio of workers to dependents) than its neighbours. But the dividend is near to being cashed out. Between 2000 and 2010, the share of the population under 14—future providers for their parents—slumped from 23% to 17%. China now has too few young people, not too many.

(b) A report:
China's population   | Only and Lonely. China’s most populous province launches a public criticism of the one-child policy. Economist, July 21, 2011.
http://www.economist.com/node/18988926

Quote:

"Until recently most discussion in China has been confined to academic demographers. Many of them argue that the policy did little good when it began and is increasingly damaging now that the fertility rate is below the replacement level and China’s population structure—the balance between young, middle-aged and old—is becoming so skewed.

"This month the debate became political. A provincial official went public with a request to let Guangdong—China’s most populous province, with 104m people—loosen the rules. Speaking to newspapers, Zhang Feng, director of Guangdong’s Population and Family Planning Commission, said he had applied for 'approval to be the leader in the country in the relaxation of the family-planning policy'.

Note: ZHANG feng  张峰 (广东省计生委主任)

--