China’s adoption of 2-child policy

“The mother of a newly born girl put her daughter in a plastic bag and handed her over to a foreigner. She put a daughter she had given birth earlier on the river as well.” These are excerpts from “Petals that Fell on the Yangtze River,” a novel about girls that fell victim to China’s "one child policy" by German writer German writer Caroline Phillips. Nobel prize-winning economist Amartya Sen said in 1990, "In India, China and some other countries in the world, girls are killed, aborted & abandoned because they are girls. The United Nations estimates as many as 200 million girls are missing in the world today because of gendercide."

China has officially discarded on Thursday its one-child policy, which it had maintained for 35 years. China has made robust growth thanks to abundant labor, but is now worrying about an aging population. China’s workforce started to decline from 2011, and its total fertility rate stands at 1.43 children, thus nearing the international barometer of low fertility (1.3). As China, the world’s most populous country at 1.4 billion people, has adopted two-child policy as a way to secure growth potential, the measure is set to wield significant impact on the international community.

For one, stock prices of the world’s dairy companies soared. It is a situation similar to a butterfly’s flapping spawning a hurricane in the Atlantic Ocean.” Analysts say that since the measure will enable more than 90 million Chinese couples to give birth to two children, extra 2.5 million to 5 million babies will be born every year. China is consuming half of the world’s baby formula production already. After "poison baby formula" scandal in which baby formula products were found to contain toxic chemical melamine in China in 2008, imported baby formula became the most favored gift among Chinese mothers with babies. Shares of Korean baby clothing companies including Agabang and 0to7 also jumped in tandem.

It has been long since rural villagers have a chance to hear the sound of a crying baby in Korea, too. The total fertility rate of 1983 fell to blow 2.1, the barometer for zero population growth in Korea, but the country only introduced measures to shore up the low birthrate for the first time in 2006. “Time will soon come when Korea will have to choose between promotion of childbirths and admission of immigrants,” said then Health and Welfare minister Jeon Jae-hee in 2009. “No act is more patriotic than giving birth to children.” Now six years later, low fertility rate is even more serious, but the government’s sense of crisis seems to have rather waned.

ysshin@donga.com