China's birth rate problem
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 816 Ratings
🗓️ 18 June 2021
⏱️ 19 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
After decades of restrictions, China's leaders want women to have more children. But will a 'three-child' policy prevent a decline in China's population?
Ed Butler speaks to Professor Stein Emil Vollset from the University of Washington School of Medicine about the dramatic population declines expected in many countries including China. China demographics expert Yong Cai explains why the declining birth rate will be difficult to reverse. And author and journalist Mei Fong tells us why the one-child policy of the past will make it even harder for Chinese authorities to promote larger families in the future.
(Photo: A nurse holding a baby at an infant care centre in Yongquan, in Chongqing municipality, in southwest China; Credit: Getty Images)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi there, I'm Ed Butler. Welcome to Business Daily from the BBC. Today, go forth and multiply the appeal to Chinese women to have more babies. |
| 0:12.7 | My generation, we don't see it as a compulsory thing. We have the freedom to say yes or no. And raising a child or even just having a child is an expensive thing. |
| 0:23.2 | Well, an official three-child policy is being pushed in the People's Republic because China's |
| 0:28.3 | birth rate is about to head south. We forecast quite dramatic population declines in China, |
| 0:35.8 | close to a halfing of China's population between now and 2100. |
| 0:41.1 | China's new demographic bomb and what it might mean for its economic plans, business daily from the BBC. |
| 0:50.8 | Today, today's most sure watch the news, Wuh saying, we're saying this |
| 0:56.7 | change is in the future |
| 0:59.0 | The news announced on Chinese television at the end of May |
| 1:02.7 | that from now on, |
| 1:04.2 | couples will be free to have up to three children. |
| 1:11.0 | The move came from the very top, we're told, from Xi Jinping himself, |
| 1:16.2 | a response to data that indicates the number of children being born in China is rapidly |
| 1:20.7 | declining. |
| 1:22.0 | Official media made a huge deal of it. |
| 1:24.2 | They rolled out all these posters with three children in a family on, |
| 1:29.5 | smiley faces, smiley-faced children. China has a problem now that the labor market is shrinking |
| 1:35.6 | because of the one-child policy, because the parents of the children who grew up in the |
| 1:41.9 | one-child policy are starting to retire. |
| 1:46.9 | And there are fewer people, fewer children. |
| 1:52.3 | There needs to be more people in China in order to take up the labour, the momentum that it's going. |
| 1:55.2 | That's the BBC's China media analyst Kerry Allen, |
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