Chinese citizens on Monday reacted with skepticism to a policy shift by the government allowing married couples to have up to three children.
Beijing scrapped its decades-old one-child policy in 2016, replacing it with a two-child limit that failed to result in a sustained surge in births given the high cost of raising children in Chinese cities - a challenge that remains.
Early this month, China's once-in-a-decade census showed that the population grew at its slowest rate during the last decade since the 1950s, to 1.41 billion. Data also showed a fertility rate of just 1.3 children per woman for 2020 alone, on par with ageing societies like Japan and Italy.
Jean-Pierre Cabestan, a professor of political science at Bapist University of Hong Kong, said that unless the government introduces real incentives for couples to have more children, it may not solve the issue of population decline in the long run.
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 ageing population and maintaining the advantage, endowment of human resources," the official Xinhua news agency said. It did not specify the support measures.
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