Beyond the ifs and buts of fertility rate

The year 2015 will be of special importance to China in terms of population policy because it has seen a milestone revision to the family planning policy. In 2014, one after another province adopted detailed regulations to implement the decision of the country's top leadership in 2013 to allow couples to have two children if even one of them was the only child of his/her parents. But contrary to expectations, only 1.85 million couples in the country, or 16.8 percent of the 11 million eligible couples, had applied by October 2015 to have a second child.

At the Fifth Plenum of 18th Communist Party of China Central Committee in November, the top leadership decided, in principle, to allow all couples to have two children, pending the revision of the family planning law by the National People's Congress Standing Committee.

Since the beginning of 2015, questions were raised about the possible revision of the family planning policy because fewer and fewer couples want to have two children. Many surveys have shown that few ordinary couples dare to have a second child because the financial cost of raising children is very high. If that indeed is the case, the initial purpose of revising the family planning policy, that is, to offset the effects of China's aging population in order to have enough working-age people, is not likely to be fulfilled.