In China, signs that the one-child policy may be coming to an end

The village that disproved the fear

Hu Yanqin lives in the Jiuquan region of Gansu province, at the edge of the Gobi desert — one of the rare places in China where rural families have been free to have two children since 1985. When she married seven years ago, she planned for one child anyway. Not because of the law, but because of the cost. "Those people with two children are those who are better off," said Hu, 32, dropping her six-year-old son at kindergarten. "The majority of people in my village only have one child."

Jiuquan's birth rate runs 8 to 9 per 1,000 people — below the national average of about 12. Reform advocates point to Hu and millions like her as proof that relaxing the one-child policy would not unleash a baby boom: economics, not edicts, now limits family size.

The arithmetic turns against the policy

Implemented in 1980, the policy covers 63 percent of China's population, and Beijing credits it with averting 400 million births. But by 2013 it was increasingly seen as an impediment to growth — and a source of looming social crisis. The labor force, roughly 930 million strong, was projected to start shrinking around 2025 at about 10 million workers a year, while the elderly population would rise from some 200 million to 360 million by 2030. "If this goes on, there will be no taxpayers, no workers and no caregivers for the elderly," said Gu Baochang, a demography professor at Renmin University.

The data was already moving: China's top statistician, Ma Jiantang, announced that the working-age population (aged 15 to 59) had fallen for the first time, and called for "an appropriate and scientific family planning policy." Economists added another indictment — the policy fuels China's famously high savings rate, since a single child may eventually support two parents (and a married couple, four), forcing working adults to hoard for old age instead of spending. That, in turn, has delayed the "rebalancing" of China's economy toward domestic consumption.

The political signal

Expectations of reform had been building since November 2012, when outgoing President Hu Jintao conspicuously dropped the phrase "maintain a low birth rate" from his work report to the Communist Party congress — the first such omission by a top leader in a decade. "I think that the 18th Party Congress report indicates that, and this is my personal interpretation, the one-child policy is going to be adjusted," said Ji Baocheng, a parliament delegate who favors change. The new leadership under Xi Jinping was to take power formally in March 2013, and reformers were hopeful: "The adjustment of the policy is certain, it's only a question of time," said a recently retired family-planning official.

The brutal side

Enforcement remained harsh. Couples who defied the rules faced fines and job loss; in some cases mothers were subjected to forced abortions or sterilizations. The previous summer, the forced abortion of a woman seven months pregnant had triggered outrage on the Chinese internet and international condemnation. Yet evidence had long suggested the policy was no longer needed to restrain births — and that it was distorting them. In 2008, Gu and the Brookings-Tsinghua Center studied two-child pilot programs covering about 8 million people across four regions, concluding that child-rearing costs alone held birthrates down, while the freedom to have two children produced a less skewed gender ratio.

The 2009 attempt to expand the pilots to four or five more regions was dropped for lack of leadership consensus.

The missing girls

China's traditional preference for sons, compressed through a one-child limit, had produced about 118 boys for every 100 girls born — against a global norm of 103 to 107. In Jiuquan, where two children were permitted, the ratio was a far less skewed 110 to 100. Tian Xueyuan, one of the original drafters of the one-child policy, said he had warned party leaders nearly a decade earlier: "A substantial portion of China's men will not be able to find a match ... and that will be a major factor of social instability." The policy, he said, "has run its course" — "a special policy with a time limit, specifically, to control the births of one generation."

Resistance persisted: family-planning chief Wang Xia insisted China would "unswervingly adhere" to the policy, dismaying reformers. And even in relaxed Jiuquan, control remained tight — IUDs after the first child, sterilization after the second, a 30,000-yuan fine for exceeding the two-child quota. Few tried. "It's hard to raise a child," said Xing Juan, 26, a mother of one. "The burden is heavy."

Archive summary, February 2013, of Reuters' original reporting from Gansu province. (What happened next: in October 2015, China replaced the one-child policy with a universal two-child policy.)