China is allowing couples to have up to three children in a major shift from the existing two child limit.
The announcement comes after recent data showed a dramatic decline in births in the world’s most populous country.
The policy change will come with “supportive measures, which will be conducive to improving our country’s population structure, fulfilling the country’s strategy of actively coping with an ageing population”, the official Xinhua news agency said following a politburo meeting chaired by President Xi Jinping.
Among those measures, China will lower educational costs for families, step up tax and housing support, guarantee the legal interests of working women and clamp down on “sky-high” dowries, it said.
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It would also look to educate young people “on marriage and love”.
Beijing scrapped its decades-old one-child policy in 2016, replacing it with a two-child limit to try and stave off risks to its economy from a rapidly ageing population.
But that failed to result in a sustained surge in births given the high cost of raising children in Chinese cities, a challenge that persists to this day.
China had a fertility rate of just 1.3 children per woman in 2020, recent data showed, on par with ageing societies like Japan and Italy and far short of the roughly 2.1 needed for replacement level.
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“People are held back not by the two-children limit, but by the incredibly high costs of raising children in today’s China.
“Housing, extracurricular activities, food, trips, and everything else add up quickly,” Yifei Li, a sociologist at NYU Shanghai, told Reuters.
“Raising the limit itself is unlikely to tilt anyone’s calculus in a meaningful way, in my view.”
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Early this month, a once-in-a-decade census showed that the population grew at its slowest rate during the last decade since the 1950s, to 1.41 billion, fueling concerns that China would grow old before it gets wealthy as well as criticism that it had waited too long to address declining births.
“This is without a doubt a step in the right direction, but still it’s a bit timid,” Shuang Ding, chief economist at Standard Chartered in Hong Kong said.
“A fully liberalised birth policy should have been implemented at least five years ago, but it’s too late now, although its better late than never,” he said.