China`s current low birth rate facing challenges

Beijing: China`s current low birth rate may not be sustained due to widening wealth gap and early marriages in rural areas and the world`s most populous nation is facing risks of a "population rebound," a senior official has warned. "Early marriages are still prevailing in some parts of the country, especially in rural areas, which goes against the family planning policy," Director of the National Population and Family Planning Commission (NPFPC), Zhang Weiqing has said. China`s constitution rules that men may marry at 22 and women at 20, while the country`s family planning policy, which has been implemented since the 1970s, encourages late marriages and late childbearing, and limits most urban couples to one child and most rural couples to two. China`s widening wealth gap is challenging the country`s family planning efforts as its new-rich disdain the decades-old one-child policy to pay to have as many children as they like, Zhang said. The number of rich people and celebrities having more than one child is on a rapid increase, and nearly 10 per cent of them even have three, according to a recent survey by the NPFPC. Zhang said, young couples, born in the 1970s and 1980s and raised as only children, now in their twenties and thirties, are allowed to have a second child, which also contributed to the rising birth rate in some central and western provinces. The NPFPC will continue to offer preferential services to couples following the family planning policy, Zhang said, adding the government`s spending on family planning will be raised to 30 yuan (USD3.8) per person during the 11th five-year plan period (2006-2010). China`s family planning policy is credited with reducing the country`s population by 400 million and delaying the present 1.3 billion population mark by four years. Meanwhile, a Chinese health official has called for attention to risks facing rural women who dare not to seek professional maternity services because they are having more babies than the country`s family planning policy allows. "Some policy-breaking pregnant women, who dared not apply any financial aid of childbearing for fear of legal punishment, chose to deliver babies at home or in substandard private clinics which charge little but have more medical risks," Vice Health Minister Jiang Zuojun said. Statistics show about half of the maternity deaths in East China`s Jiangxi province result from illegitimate pregnancies. Underdeveloped social security network in rural region and people`s deeply rooted traditional preference for male heirs has prompted some rural families to defy the policy by having more babies. Meanwhile, those rule-defying pregnant women would rather risk death in giving birth to babies due to substandard child-bearing conditions than a heavy fine. Jiang said the government will hand out harsher penalties to substandard rural clinics and at the same time build rural medical facilities. Local departments of health, women and children, civil affairs and public security should join efforts to reduce the death toll of rule-breaking pregnancy and to provide proper health services to rural women living in cities, Jiang added. Bureau Report