China set to finally allow a second child?

After a generation of enforcing the most extreme form of family planning in history, it seems China may finally be beginning to relax the infamous one child policy. The policy, which was initiated in an attempt to slow China's rapidly increasing population in the 1980s, while in many ways being successful at this, brought with it many controversies and other population problems for China. One of the biggest of these being the increased proportion of males, due to the Chinese culture having a preference for baby boys, and therfore many couples who were only allowed one child, were determined that this child be a boy. This means that all these baby boys will struggle to find a bride from the disproportionate amount of girls. In some rural areas, farmers are alreday being allowed to have another child if their first is female, and now pilot projects are being introduced in cities such as Beijing, Shanghai and Tianjin in an attempt to start to reverse this crippling disproportion.

The one child policy has also fastforwarded China into having an aging population. With the medical care to keep death rates low, and the young population being restricted by the policy, China is beginning to experience the problem facing many MEDCs - but before it has properly developed. So while the one child policy was able to slow the growth of China's ever rapidly increasing population in the late 20th century, it has brought with it a whole set of consequences that the country are now having to resolve -  and relaxes like those being introduced in some of the country's largest cities are only a small step towards rectifying a hugely corrupt population structure.