One Child Policy or Not, Fertility Rate Will Decline

Last August, when the one-child policy shift was announced, I wrote China to Relax One-Child Policy, But Chinese Fertility Rate Still Headed Lower

China is urbanizing and one plan for keeping growth from collapsing to near 0-3% is to push more people into cities. The fertility rates in the cities is already low by choice. China increasingly looks like Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore, where the fertility rates are 1.1, 1.1 and 0.8 children born/woman, respectively. China's fertility rate is currently about 1.6 children born/woman.

If they want to raise fertility, they should deurbanize. China's fertility rate is headed lower, one child policy or not.

Shanghai residents reluctant to have 2nd child

Shanghai people who were born in the 1980s are not rushing to have a second baby, with 40 percent of them saying one child is enough, according to a new survey.

This survey was conducted by Fudan University as part of the university's study of the Yangtze River Delta's social transformation. The survey's goal is to explore the attitudes of people born in the 1980s in the Yangtze River area and their feelings toward family, marriage, employment, migration, housing, childbearing, child education and care for aged parents.

The research team has finished the survey in Shanghai, collecting 2,367 questionnaires.

The survey found that 40 percent of the generation born in the 1980s said one baby is enough, while 56 percent said two babies is preferable.

Respondents with a higher educational background expressed more willingness to consider having a second baby.

About two-thirds of the respondents who have a bachelor's degree or above believe having two babies is preferable.

The city has more than 2 million families in which both parents are the only child. But over the past five years, only about 13,000 families applied to have another child. And in practice, fewer than 8,000 families have had a second baby, according to figures released by the Shanghai Health and Family Planning Commission in late 2013.

These are people who could already have 2 children under the one-child policy, yet only 8,000 out of 2,000,000, or 0.4%, chose to do so according to the numbers in the article.

Shanghai loosened the one-child policy effective March 1, allowing couples to have a second kid if either parent is an only child.

And in the first month after the city relaxed the policy, more than 1,700 couples with one spouse who grew up as an only child received approval to have a second baby, accounting for about 60.8 percent of the total second-child applications, according to the Shanghai Health and Family Planning Commission.

A recent poll conducted by China Daily and Touchmedia, a provider of media in taxis, said the high cost of living is the major concern for couples considering a second baby.

......The generation born in the 1980s grew up entirely under the country's one-child policy and experienced the country's reform era, and it accounts for about 5.6 million people in Shanghai.