Beijing:
China announced on Monday that married couples may have up to three children, a major policy shift from the existing limit of two after recent data showed a dramatic decline in births in the world's most populous country.
The change was approved during a politburo meeting chaired by President Xi Jinping, the official news agency Xinhua reported.
In 2016, China scrapped its decades-old one-child policy – initially imposed to halt a population explosion – with a two-child limit, which failed to result in a sustained surge in births as the high cost of raising children in Chinese cities deterred many couples from starting families.
But after a brief rise the next year, births declined. Couples say they are put off by the cost of having children, disruption to jobs, and the need to look after their own parents. The share of working-age people 15 to 59 in the population fell to 63.3 percent last year from 70.1 percent a decade earlier, according to the census data. The group aged 65 and older grew to 13.5 percent from 8.9 percent.
The 12 million births reported last year were down nearly one-fifth from 2019. About 40 percent were second children, down from 50 percent in 2017, according to Ning Jizhe, a statistics official who announced the data on May 11.
"To further optimise the birth policy, (China) will implement a one-married-couple-can-have-three-children policy," Xinhua said in a report on the meeting.
The policy change will come with "supportive measures, which will be conducive to improving our country's population structure, fulfilling the country's strategy of actively coping with an ageing population and maintaining the advantage, endowment of human resources", Xinhua said.
It did not specify the support measures.
The announcement drew a chilly response on Chinese social media, where many people said they could not afford to have even one or two children.
"I am willing to have three children if you give me 5 million yuan ($785,650)," one user posted on Weibo
Early this month, China's once-in-a-decade census showed that the population grew at its slowest rate during the last decade since the 1950s, to 1.41 billion.
Data also showed a fertility rate of just 1.3 children per woman for 2020 alone, on a par with ageing societies like Japan and Italy. read more
Also on Monday, China's politburo said it would phase-in delays in the country's retirement ages, but did not provide any details.