China has taken the first step towards ending its controversial one-child policy by encouraging urban couples in Shanghai to have two children. Yes, Shanghai local government is to encourage some families to have two children as China takes steps to relax its strict one-child policy in response to the ageing population, state press reported Friday. Urban couples in China’s most populous city will be urged to have two children if the husband and wife are themselves only children, the China Daily said.
Such couples have been made exempt from the national policy anyway; local governments don’t directly challenge central authority. But to visit couples at home suggesting that they have another child nevertheless indicates the depth of feelings in many parts of urban China that the policy has failed. Attempts by the government to link economic progress since the ’70s to population control didn’t succeed; and the coming “four-two-one” problem, where one earner fears being responsible for six dependents in the generations above, has fuelled demands that the policy end now.
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