Planning for the future family as society ages

Chinese society is aging much faster than expected and with the working-age population declining, children have become a pressing issue for the country, Li Yang reports.

The British economist Thomas Robert Malthus could not have expected his book An Essay on the Principle of Population published in 1798 would become a Bible for the family planning authority in China more than 200 years later.

Malthus argued a fast increase in population causes famine, a specter that has haunted China since warlords controlled swathes of the country in the early 1900s.