By Tenzin Monlam
DHARAMSHALA, October 30: China on Thursday ended its ‘One-child policy’ after 35 years of implementation to curb its ever-growing population. The announcement came after a four-day Fifth Plenary Session of the 18th Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee in Beijing.
Li Bin, Head of the National Health and Family Planning Commission told Xinhua, the official news agency, “The change of policy is intended to balance population development and address the challenge of an ageing population.”
The new policy has come at a time when the Chinese birth rate is on decline and rapidly aging population are pushing the country’s demographic into a crisis status.
Some see it as a positive step. However, William Nee, a Hong Kong-based activist for Amnesty International is not buying the new policy laid out by the Communist party.
“The state has no business regulating how many children people have.”
“If China is serious about respecting human rights, the government should immediately end such invasive and punitive controls over people’s decisions to plan families and have children,” she told The Guardian.
According to the National Bureau of statistics of China, since its implementation in 1980, it has resulted in an estimated reduction of over 400 million births in China. It may have managed to contain the growth but it has destabilized the country’s sex ratio, some say. The policy has also caused forced sterilizations, infanticide and sex-selective abortions.
Feng Jianmei, in June 2012, was forced to have an abortion at seven months for breaching the one-child policy, which created a worldwide outcry. Subsequently, China had to apologize for the forced abortion, which became rampant when the policy was in action.
Speaking to RFA, retired Shandong University professor Sun Wenguang said that the party’s abandonment of the ‘one-child policy’ is an attempt to distance itself from a litany of rights abuses linked to the country’s draconian family-planning regime.
“Of course it is an admission of previous mistakes, but it’s too late for that,” Sun said. “The family planning policy has been in place for 35 years, during which time it resorted to cruelty and violence to control the birth rate among the general population.”
