China announces new incentives for couples to have more children amid population decline

Amid the population crisis in the nation, China on Tuesday announced new guidelines to implement the support system aimed to motivate more couples to have babies. The Chinese administration in the new guidelines offered perks like preferential housing for couples who give birth to more than one child and better maternity leave policies, Global Times reported. Notably, China ended its one-child policy which allows couples to have just three babies.

17 Chinese government departments have issued guidelines to set up a fertility-friendly society and encourage couples to have more children. The guidelines released by the government departments include promoting prenatal and postnatal care, giving preferential housing facilities to couples giving birth to more than one baby, setting up nursing facilities, improving rules related to maternity leave and insurance, high-quality education resources and fertility-friendly employment environment. 

China's population to witness negative growth 

According to a report by Global Times, Yang Wenzhuang, head of population and family affairs at the National Health Commission said China's population will experience a negative growth during the 14th Five-Year Plan period between 2021 to 2025. He made the remarks at the 2022 Annual Conference of the China Population Association. Chinese demographers have said that negative population growth will become a dominant trend in the next few years. The demographers stressed that improving the quality of the population and making changes to economic development plans are needed to address the issue. 

Huang Wenzheng, a demography expert and senior researcher at the Center for China and Globalization, told the Global Times "it can be predicted that China's birth rate will continue to shrink for more than a century." Wenzheng added that the birth rate will continue to reduce in first-tier cities. According to the Global Times report in July, the birth rate for 2021 released by 29 provinces and regions in China indicated that the number of births in 2021 has reached the lowest in decades in several provinces. The top 10 provinces which have the most births include Hunan, Guizhou, Shandong, Sichuan, Hebei, Guizhou, Anhui, Guangdong, Henan, Guangxi and Jiangsu. As per the news report, Guangdong province has recorded more than 1 million new births. The number of births reported in Central China's Henan province has reduced below 5,00,000 for the first time in around six decades. 

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