A fresh government poster went up the other day on the alley wall not far from our front door in Beijing. I barely paused at the cheery patriotic exhortations across the flag—Is that a sign I’ve been here a while?—and my eye fell instead on a curious thing about the family: it has two kids.

I first noticed that two-kid families had begun popping up in advertisements for KFC and General Electric a little over a year ago, but political advertising is something else entirely. The Party has held much of China to a one-child-per-family policy for thirty years, and, by and large, it still does. Some parts of the program are comically antique: a Beijing mother reminded me today that families with one child in the capital are still automatically eligible to receive a monthly “reward” from the state for adhering to the one-child plan. The amount hasn’t changed since it was set in 1979: five yuan a month, about seventy-nine cents. (It doesn’t go as far as it once did, now that China is the world’s largest consumer of Rolls Royces.)

But the Party propagandists may be on to something. Two-child families may not be so far over the horizon after all, because of a growing consensus that economic pressures demand a change.

Labels: aging, children, China, demographics, economics, one-child policy, population control

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More than 24 million Chinese men of marrying age could find themselves without spouses in 2020, state media reported on Monday, citing a study that blamed sex-specific abortions as a major factor.

The study, by the government-backed Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, named the gender imbalance among newborns as the most serious demographic problem for the country's population of 1.3 billion, the Global Times said. ...

Researcher Wang Guangzhou said the skewed birth ratio could lead to difficulties for men with lower incomes in finding spouses, as well as a widening age gap between partners, according to the Global Times.

Another researcher quoted by the newspaper, Wang Yuesheng, said men in poorer parts of China would be forced to accept marriages late in life or remain single for life, which could "cause a break in family lines."

"The chance of getting married will be rare if a man is more than 40 years old in the countryside. They will be more dependent on social security as they age and have fewer household resources to rely on," Wang said. ...

The Global Times said abductions and trafficking of women were "rampant" in areas with excess numbers of men, citing the National Population and Family Planning Commission.

Labels: abortion, China, demographics, one-child policy

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