“Shanghai urges ‘two-child policy’ ”, BBC News, 24/7. China has a growing ageing population, so some cities are wanting to increase the one-child policy to two children. Big mistake! China already has nearly 1.4 billion people; the last thing they need is to increase this.
Micky Bristow, BBC News Chinese and foreign experts have been saying for some time that China needs to change its strict family planning rules. If the country continues as it is, the proportion of elderly people in society will continue to increase. This is a problem because it will leave a smaller group of workers paying for the country’s retired population.
All these extra young people will one day be old, so, using this logic, even more younger people will be needed to support them…and this keeps growing exponentially until the population reaches some absurdly high and unsustainable number. Ageing is a fact of life that countries just have to deal with; once that particular generation of older people have passed on, the population declines.
Coincidentally, there was an opinion piece in The Age, 25/7, on the issue of an ageing population, and how it is not necessarily a bad thing: “We should celebrate enhanced longevity” (originally from The Guardian).
