STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
All right. This is a mind-blowing story about numbers - population numbers. China still has the world's largest population after India, but it saw its birth rate last year drop to the lowest level in many decades. Ten years ago, China abolished its policy limiting each family to one child in an effort to improve the birth rate. It's now paying families to have more kids. But as NPR's Anthony Kuhn reports, reversing the trend is an uphill battle.
ANTHONY KUHN, BYLINE: National Statistics Bureau Director Kang Yi read last year's population figures to reporters.
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KANG YI: (Speaking Chinese).
KUHN: "There were 7.9 million births last year and 11.3 million deaths," he said, "meaning a natural population growth rate of -2.4 per thousand people." According to official statistics, that's the lowest birth rate since the communists took power in 1949. China now has about 1.4 billion people. Last year, China rolled out several policies to prop up the birth rate. The government announced subsidies of about $500 a year for every child under the age of 3, and it ended tax exemptions for condoms and other birth control methods. University of Wisconsin-Madison population expert Yi Fuxian says the effects of those policies could become visible this year.
YI FUXIAN: (Through interpreter) The cost of raising children is so high that $500 is not going to offset it. It may have some effect, but not much.
KUHN: Yi notes that China is following in the footsteps of the world's most aged nation, Japan, which has paid far bigger subsidies but has still not reversed its declining birth rate. And of course, Japan did not have a one-child policy, which Yi argues lives on in people's views and behavior a decade after China scrapped it.
YI: (Through interpreter) China's one-child policy changed two or three generations of people's attitudes towards childbirth. Everyone now assumes that having only one child is a social norm.
KUHN: A decade ago, when the one-child policy was scrapped, some Chinese jokingly wondered whether after decades of limiting births, sometimes through forced sterilizations and abortions, the government would now force them to have children. Yi says that coercion will not work, but what will work is a puzzle no country seems to have solved.
Anthony Kuhn, NPR News, Seoul.
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