China: One-Child Policy Heading for a Revision · Global Voices
George Sun

According to Time magazine, the one-child policy, a cornerstone of contemporary China, will be changed when word got out late last week that Shanghai was encouraging couples to have additional offspring.
For three decades, millions of Chinese parents have raised their only children under the strict prescriptions of China’s family planning rules. Now, faced with an aging crisis, authorities in Shanghai have for the first time begun to encourage young couples to have two children, a move that marks the Chinese government’s first official step away from this intervening policy.
It is said that Beijing is now rethinking the controversial one-child policy that has helped spur economic growth since the economic reform and opening-up— but exacted a heavy social cost as well.
When the news got widely discussed by Chinese newspapers and magazines, it also stirred the netizens’ interest and raised lots of argument. An English blogger thinks that a more major change will take place in Chinese big cities:
Bringing this initiative to one of China's biggest cities will be a major step, and it will be interesting to see how much more China relaxes the (still-popular) policy.
Under the one-child policy, there's an imbalance of population in Shanghai. Blogger Brendan Malone says the burden of young people is quite heavy:
Yet the fewer numbers are exactly what has Shanghai worried, because the city is faced with not enough young men and women to sustain its aging population.
Another blogger says the change of one-child policy has a deeper sense, not only about the development but also related to the necessity of the policy itself:
计划生育政策是我们的国策，但不是永远的办法。在上个世纪70年代推行计划生育政策时，中央和国务院的许诺是30年，现在30年已经到了，就应该承诺。
Because of this, some argue that why only people in Shanghai has this privilege to have more children.  A reader complains that this is quite unfair:
凭什么上海想生二胎就可以生，难道上海不属于中国，上海经济有特权，难道人也有特权吗？老龄化可以放开户口限制，坚决抗议。
A woman in Sichuan who is the only child of her parents complains it's difficult for her and her husband  to have more children only because they are not in Shanghai:
如果准许生二胎 那么任何夫妇都应该可以生 为什么要有那么多条条框框呀？不成了特殊群体的特殊权利了吗？我老公有个哥哥 我是独生子女 我们都在外地工作 家也安在外地 有个儿子 我还想着生个女儿呢！
But, if all the Chinese can have their second children, the result can be terrible. A blogger comments:
中国这个世界人口大国，难道还嫌人口不够多？事实上，鼓励二胎的努力，主要目的是为了平衡劳动力的变少和老龄人口的增多。多年来，中国的计划生育政策一方面取得了巨大的成功，另一方面似乎又非常失败。它有效控制了人口，但却又导致了强制堕胎现象出现。
Chen Jibing, a journalist in Shanghai, writes in his blog that the abandoning of one-child policy reflects a cultural anxiety of natives in Shanghai:
我个人认为，这里还有更深层次的心理原因——“你想不想生二胎”这个问题背后，隐含的其实是上海乃至整个中国东南沿海发达地区的一种文化焦虑。
在上海，我相信每个像我这样年龄的中青年父母都会有一个不大不小的烦恼——孩子不愿也不会说上海话。按照目前的这种趋势，恐怕不需要再过30年，曾一度被全国人民拿来作为讽刺小品素材的上海方言将会基本消失。