Will you have a second child? Normally that question might have sounded indiscreet, even if I already have a first. Yet in China this weekend, those words were on everyone’s lips after President Xi Jinping announced that couples would no longer be bound by the “one-child” policy that had been in force since 1979.
That rule was introduced at a time when China’s population was growing so fast that the country’s leaders feared the country might not be able to provide for all its people. Now, the current leadership has pragmatic reasons for relaxing it. By 2050, it is reckoned that one-quarter of China’s 1.4bn people will be 65 or over. In a country propelled to economic greatness by a plentiful supply of labour, workers will suddenly be in short supply — and a population that has grown used to improving living standards might fall on harder times.
The siblingless Chinese of the one-child generation are now in their mid-twenties and early thirties, so the government has picked a good moment to encourage them to have more children. But, while a rule can easily be abolished, the human consequences of one of the most far-reaching policy experiments in history will take longer to undo.