Stamp of approval for 3-child families in China
CHINA’s postage stamp to celebrate the Year of the Pig will depict a family of the animals with three piglets — the latest move to encourage couples to have more children.
The 2019 stamp design is seen as a signal that Beijing is ready to abolish its restrictive birth policy next year and urge Chinese families to have up to three children.
China Post unveiled the Year of the Pig stamp for 2019 Monday and commentators see the imagery used as an indication of China planning to abandon birth restrictions and a likely announcement to this effect by the end of the year when the country celebrates its 40th anniversary of reform and opening up.
There is also a precedent. China Post had released a similar stamp in 2016 — the Year of the Monkey — which showed two baby monkeys. Subsequently, the Chinese government had announced that the one-child policy had been abandoned.
The mouthpiece of the Communist Party of China, People’s Daily, had carried an opinion piece the same day the stamp was released, saying that China’s continuing low birth rate was increasingly affecting Chinese society and economy. It also said that raising the birth rate required a systematic national solution.
“China’s demographic dividend is dwindling, labour costs are rising and social security pressure is large,” the paper said.
China is staring at a looming ageing crisis, with a massively declining birth rate threatening to derail its development. In an attempt to control its booming population in the late seventies, the Chinese government put in place a restrictive one-child policy slapping massive fines on offenders. For an already heavily populated nation, Chinese officials earlier defended the one-child policy claiming that it had helped avert nearly 400 million births. At the same time, China did reap the benefits of its demographic dividend as its massive population supplied cheap labour to the world’s industries.
According to its census, China had a total population of 1,347 billion spread over a total area of 95,96 lakh sq km. The 2017 estimates peg its population at 1,390 billion.
In the eighties and the nineties, the Old Dependency Ratio, which refers to the ratio of the elderly population to the working-age population, and the number of the elderly population that every 100 people at working ages will take care of was pegged at 8,3. It now stands at 15,9.
This has put a greater burden on China’s working young as well as the government which has been forced to run pension schemes and health care systems for the aged.
These factors are said to create an even greater load on China’s one-child policy generation, which grew up without any siblings. Once they grow up they will have to face the financial burden of looking after not only their own parents but also four grandparents.
Chinese sociologists call this 4-2-1 family structure and say that this will cause the purchasing power of individuals to fall in the long run. — Indian Times.