China: Public is not impressed with CCP's plan for new 3 child policy

PUBLIC MEETS “THREE-CHILD POLICY” WITH SKEPTICISM, RIDICULE, AND SORROW
China Digital Times

China has announced a new three-child policy—the latest sign the central government is worried about the country’s demographics. The 2015 repeal and replacement of the one-child policy with a two-child policy did not boost falling fertility rates, the ratio of births to women of childbearing age. This past May, the results of China’s once-a-decade census revealed that China’s fertility rate was 1.3, significantly lower than the replacement level of 2.1. At The New York Times, Sui Lee wrote about the government’s latest attempt to boost births, a move widely perceived to be inadequate:

The announcement by the ruling Communist Party represents an acknowledgment that its limits on reproduction, the world’s toughest, have jeopardized the country’s future. The labor pool is shrinking and the population is graying, threatening the industrial strategy that China has used for decades to emerge from poverty to become an economic powerhouse.

[…] “The decision makers have probably realized that the population situation is relatively severe,” said He Yafu, an independent demographer based in the southern Chinese city of Zhanjiang. “But merely opening up the policy to three children and not encouraging births as a whole, I don’t think there will be a significant increase in the fertility rate. Many people don’t want to have a second child, let alone a third child.”

[…] The party’s reluctance to abandon its right to dictate reproductive rights points to the power of such policies as tools of social control. Even as the country has struggled to raise birthrates, the authorities in the western region of Xinjiang have been forcing women of Muslim ethnic minorities, like the Uyghurs, to have fewer babies in an effort to suppress their population growth. [Source- New York Times]
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