西亚试剂：China's birth rate won't be dramatically affected by end of

China’s Communist Party is abandoning its controversial one-child policy — but demographers think that the nation’s low birth rate is unlikely to dramatically increase as a result.

All couples in China will in future be allowed to have two children, not one, the Communist Party announced on 29 October. "From a human-rights perspective this is very good news," says Patrick Gerland, a demographer with the United Nations (UN) Population Division in New York. "But it will hardly have a major long-term effect on population growth in modern China, where many women are now more concerned about jobs and careers than is reconcilable with having a large family."

The one child-rule was introduced in 1979 to stop excessive population growth, at a time when China’s society was much less urbanized than it is today, and women were having 2.8 children on average. It is thought to have prevented 400 million births in a nation that now numbers 1.4 billion. Still, it has been relaxed in recent years: couples in which one partner comes from a one-child family are allowed to have a second child if they want, for example.

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The ending of the one-child rule was not unexpected, experts say. Low fertility rates in countries such as Japan and Germany are leading to an ageing population, raising concerns over the mounting costs of social welfare and health systems. China's decision seems to have been prompted by similar worries

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