Fertility Policy in China: Future Options

A wide range of social, economic, and demographic criteria are used to evaluate China's present one-child policy and five alternative fertility policies that might guide China's population control efforts until the end of the century when the one-child policy is scheduled to be abandoned. These criteria include the policies' macrodemographic impact on total population size and population aging; their microdemographic effects on the family's ability to support the elderly, its economic capabilities, and the position of women; and their cultural acceptability to the majority Han Chinese population. The results suggest that the least desirable strategy is to retain the present policy; all the two-child alternatives perform better than the current one-child policy in achieving the policy goals considered.