Closing a Sociodemographic Chapter of Chinese History

Abstract

At its recent Fifth Plenary Session held in Beijing, the Eighteenth Central Committee of the Communist Party of China decided to abolish the one‐child policy and allow all couples to have two children, thus closing an important chapter of China's social and demographic history. Recent fertility trends make it clear why it is urgent to abandon this policy. Census and survey data show that China's TFR had already fallen below replacement in 1991. Since the mid‐1990s, TFRs in most years have been lower than 1.5 children per woman. Since 2010, even lower fertility rates have been recorded by the annual population change surveys. Since the mid‐1990s, fertility decline has been increasingly driven by generalized ideational changes resulting from the social, economic, and cultural transformation of recent decades. In recent years many couples who were entitled to have a second child have chosen not to do so. For this reason, the termination of the one‐child policy is unlikely to lead to a major upturn in fertility, but rather to the continuation of a low‐fertility regime with more diverse fertility patterns across different sub‐populations, a pattern that has been observed in many countries.