China to Ease Limits on Births, Allowing Couples to Have Three Children

  

China’s top decision-making body said Monday the government would ease its birth-control policy to allow all couples in the country to have three children, the state-run Xinhua News Agency reported.

The move is the latest measure aimed at tackling China’s aging population after Beijing relaxed its birth policy to let couples have up to two children in 2015. The announcement comes just weeks after a once-in-a-decade census showed China’s population on the cusp of a historic turning point after decades of rapid growth.

The Communist Party’s Politburo said after a meeting Monday chaired by leader Xi Jinping that it would offer more equitable educational resources and reduce educational expenditures for families—widely seen by experts as factors holding back many young couples from having more children.

The Politburo also pledged to improve the nation’s maternity-leave policies, enhance its tax and housing policies and better protect the rights of female workers in a bid to encourage couples to have more babies.

The number of births in China stood at 12 million in 2020, an 18% drop from a year earlier and the fourth straight year of declining births, following an increase in 2016. The data, released in this month’s government census, was seen as a major factor in pushing Beijing to further relax its birth restrictions.

“To further optimize 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 aging population and maintaining the advantage, endowment of human resources,” Xinhua said.

It did not specify the support measures.