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Why China Needs Two


The big news out of China last week was, of course, the Party’s decision to alter its longstanding family planning policy.

Overseas media were quick to hail “the end of the one-child policy.” Inside China, however, the official line was simply that the limit on childbearing had been raised from one to two. The same restrictions and enforcement mechanisms that have marked the one-child policy will now be applied to the new two-child policy.

Justification for the change came in the form of a tersely worded statement citing the need to counter the ageing of China’s population.

As I explain in my forthcoming book, China’s Urban Christians, A Light that Cannot be Hidden, China’s family planning policy has, over the past three decades, severely skewed the country’s normal population pattern:

Finally, as China’s birth rates have been brought under control during the past three decades the number of working-age people as a percentage of the total population has begun to plateau and will decrease steadily over the next decade. Meanwhile the proportion of China’s elderly has begun to mushroom. The pyramid-shaped demographic profile that characterized China up through the 1970s, with a large pool of children and youth at the bottom and a comparatively smaller elderly population at the top, is rapidly being replaced by a barrel-shaped contour featuring a large middle-aged population that is steadily moving into the ranks of the elderly.

Today there are more than 200 million senior citizens in China. Of these some 30 million are considered disabled. As of 2012 there were only 3.9 million nursing home beds available in all of China. By 2050 the elderly population is estimated to reach 400 million, accounting for a third of the country’s total population. Given the traditional expectation that the young are to take care of their older relatives, as well as the lack of a suitable social safety net to meet the needs of China’s burgeoning older population, the burden that this demographic reality places upon the urban infrastructure is formidable.

China’s growing elderly population, along with the gender imbalance and the personal and family issues faced by the “only child” generation, place unique pressures upon the urban church. At the same time, the church is a unique opportunity to demonstrate the love of Christ in its approach to caring for its older members and for seniors within the society at large.

For more on how China’s urban church is dealing with the consequences of China’s family planning policy, read China’s Urban Christians: A Light that Cannot be Hidden (Pickwick Publications, 2015). Available for preorder on Amazon.

Image credit: Chalk Art Shot by David Woo via Flickr
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Brent Fulton

Brent Fulton

Brent Fulton is the founder of ChinaSource. Dr. Fulton served as the first president of ChinaSource until 2019. Prior to his service with ChinaSource, he served from 1995 to 2000 as the managing director of the Institute for Chinese Studies at Wheaton College. From 1987 to 1995 he served as founding …View Full Bio


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