KUNMING: A new family planning policy will be rolled out across China next
year, offering financial support to farmers who have less children.
From 2007, the mother and father of every one-child family and those with two
daughters, both living in rural areas will each receive 600 yuan (US$72) a year
from the age of 60, said Zhang Weiqing, director of the National Population and
Family Planning Commission.
A pilot project for the policy has been in place in 23 provinces and regions
since 2002, covering a total of 1.35 million senior citizens in rural areas,
Zhang Shaochun, assistant minister of the Ministry of Finance, told a national
conference on the project.
As the world's most populous country, China launched the one child-policy in
the late 1970s, to bring the spiraling birthrate under control.
Without the policy, the population could have reached nearly 1.7 billion by
now, according to the National Population and Family Planning Commission.
However, in the policy's early years local governments' main enforcement
measure was to impose fines on rural families that violated the policy.
And experts said although imposing fines has contributed to the project's
success, the policy should be adapted as the nation develops. More encouraging
measures and public education should be used to raise awareness of the need for
family planning and reduce social conflict, they advise.
In rural areas farmers often hope for sons and aim to have at least one boy
in their family, even if they are not wealthy enough to support more than one
child.
So to support ageing parents who only have one child or two daughters, and to
encourage them to obey the national policy, governments at various levels have
initiated favourable measures, such as the annual allowance for parents.
China is now an aging society, with about 10 per cent of the population over
60 a challenge to the country's lagging welfare system.
Nearly 80 per cent of the 700 million rural residents have no medical
insurance or other welfare care, and depend on their savings and their children
to look after them.
For families with only one child, the burden of taking care of their parents
is quite heavy.
In response experts have appealed to the government to take measures to help
them.
In a report about the pilot projects, revealed by the Development Research
Centre of the State Council yesterday, experts said 95 per cent of senior
residents in rural parts of Jiangxi, Gansu and Shanxi, who only have one child
or two girls, run into financial difficulty.
Although US$72 is only a small amount per person per year, the project still
made farmers considerably less worried about falling ill in old age, said Wei
Jianmin, an expert from the centre.
Encouraged by the policy, more and more farmers in the pilot areas prefer to
have only one child, and the average population increase has slowed to just 2.8
points per one thousand, the report said.
Meanwhile, rural families who have permission to have a third child, but
choose not to, have been offered a one-off award, under another pilot project
carried in several western provinces since 2000. The project will be spread
through all of western China in early 2007.
But despite the projects' success, experts have called on the government to
raise the amount of money offered to parents who chose to have only one child,
complaining that US$72 a year is too little for an elderly person living in
poverty.
So far a total of only 1 billion yuan (US$12 million) has been spent on the
project, Wei said.
