<div><strong>Simar Singh</strong><br><br>In what will be a relief to the sagging workforce in China, the Communist Party announced that it would loosen the infamous one-child policy and allow couples to have two children.</div><div> </div><div>The ‘family planning policy’ was introduced by Beijing in 1978, at a time when the Chinese population seemed to be spiralling out of control and the future seemed to hold ever increasing economic and environmental burden for the country.</div><div> </div><div>According to a Reuters report, the Communist Party said that this move aimed at alleviating demographic restraints on the company.</div><div> </div><div>With a little more than three generations in check, the Chinese government had begun the process relaxing the restriction in 2013, with the announcement that families in which one of the parents was a single child would be allowed to have an additional child. Earlier concessions had also been made for ethnic minorities and the restriction was not strongly imposed in rural areas.</div><div> </div><div>This came off the back of reports that surfaced in 2012, which for the first time in decades showed that the working age population had fallen and the trend was likely to continue and possibly exacerbate in the coming decades. What was increasingly becoming apparent was the labour shortage and the sharp slowdown of labour migration from the rural areas to the cities.</div><div> </div><div>This was definitely a point of concern for a country like China which rode its way to becoming a manufacturing giant on its massive population.</div><div> </div><div>The one-child policy which was originally intended to be applicable to a single generation had been coming under fire from scholars and demographers for some time now, with many concerns about the negative consequences of such an imposition.</div><div> </div><div>China has also regularly come under fire from the foreign media because of the human rights violations that occurred as a consequence of the administration’s crackdown on couples who flouted the rule and because of the belief that it was an individual decision to determine the size of one's own family.</div>
