Shanghai, or should I say China is now worried about supporting its aging population. In hindsight, drastic measures like the "one child" policy don't appear to be working. Like Shanghai, Singapore has been intruding upon its population's private life by influencing a balance across its ethic composition. It goes to show how policymakers don't really understand the long-term consequences of their decisions. Bringing in migrant labor is like dealing with immigration into European countries facing a similar aging population challenge.
@Financial Times
The city of Shanghai is taking the dramatic step of actively encouraging residents to exceed China’s famed “one child” limit, citing concerns about the ageing of its population and a potentially shrinking workforce.
For more than a decade, Shanghai has allowed couples to have two children if each parent was an only child, but few have done so as rapidly rising incomes in the country’s financial capital have been accompanied by falling birth rates.
So family planning officials are to nudge eligible parents harder, with plans to push leaflets under doors and make home visits to promote procreation.
“We encourage eligible couples to have two kids because it can help reduce the proportion of elderly people,” said Xie Lingli, director of the Shanghai Population and Family Planning Commission in a statement.
Some 21 per cent of Shanghai’s registered population last year were aged 60 or older, which Ms Xie said was twice the national average, and births still lag well behind the national rate of 12.14 per thousand.
While Ms Xie cited worries about the city’s employment base declining, Li Jianmin, a population expert at Nankai university, said “the workforce shortage should be solved through encouraging migrants”. But he added that second children could ease the problem of an ageing population.
Chinese children are expected to care for ageing parents but as the current generation of only children reaches maturity, they are increasingly struggling to care for two parents and up to four grandparents.
China’s decades-old one-child policy, though relaxed in some areas, remains a significant intrusion into private life.
Twelve categories of Shanghai couples are allowed to have two children, including those whose first child is disabled and those with a spouse who was a fisherman at sea for more than five years. The new campaign highlights both the one child policy in limiting population and the fact that it does not apply to all.
In most rural areas, couples have been allowed a second child if the first was not a healthy son. Ethnic minorities are also not limited to one child.
Shanghai’s initiative follows campaigns to encourage more child bearing in other crowded Asian cities such as Hong Kong and Singapore, which had previously worked to promote small families only to see birth rates trail off as income levels matched western levels.