Relatives hold new-born babies at a hospital in Huai’an, in east China’s Jiangsu province.

    China’s government told reporters Monday that it will maintain its family planning regime and hold steadfast to the one-child policy because the country faces mounting resource pressures from the high demands of its 1.34 billion citizens. 

    Yet the  announcement came just a day after leaders said they plan to strip power from the agency that oversees its one-child policy, a move some observers say signals a phase-out of the much-criticized population control.

    What does it all mean? China Real Time talked to Wang Feng, a population expert and director of the Brookings-Tsinghua Center for Public Policy in Beijing, to break down the issues.

    What’s driving the mixed messages from the government?

    Saying that there is no change is a measure to save face and a recognition that they can’t announce all the change in one day. The National Population and Family Planning Commission was created for a single mandate of controlling population growth and now they no longer have that, those powers have been dissolved.

    What the government is doing is a major political move and they cannot make or announce all the policy changes that go along with it in one day. They know they can’t dismantle everything all at once. It’s going to take some time.

    It will not take long, however, for change to come. Leaders are aware of the changing demographics. The one-child policy has taken a toll on the labor force and has jeopardized the future economy.

    The government said Sunday that family planning commission will merge with the Ministry of Health and that power to set population targets will shift from the family planning commission to China’s top economic planning body. Can you break down what this means for population control?

    Leaders are signaling that they want movement toward a market economy, so they will be factoring in population policy into the overall economic planning.

    My reading is that will mean that population control targets will be weaker and weaker over time. And we will see that the one-child policy era is over.

    The way to interpret this is that the laws are still in effect, but the judges and the policemen have all been fired. Soon the laws will also change.

    How will the government dismantle this policy that has been in effect now for more than three decades?

    That’s the hard part. They’ve basically taken a drastic measure to abolish this apparatus, but it’s not clear who is going to clean up the mess.

    Ideally, you’d want to have the people who have been implementing the one-child policy to also be the ones to help to phase it out.

    Yet this is incredibly political. The family planning commission employs more than 500,000 people and it will be difficult to change this bureaucracy and what it has done for so many years. The people employed within the system are going to be redundant and many of them will likely leave, enabling a shifting of resources to the Ministry of Health. Those resources can be used to invest in reproductive health.

    This is going to be an extremely difficult process.

    What are the top challenges to changing the policy?

    If the government decides to reverse its course, it’s not clear what kind of recourse people will expect and how the government will react.

    In some situations, people have been fined and may try to seek compensation for the fines they’ve paid. There have also been physical atrocities that have come from this policy, with some women claiming that policy enforcement has led to their physical disabilities or injuries. How will the government address those claims? It’s still unknown.

    – Laurie Burkitt. Follow her on Twitter @lburkitt



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