By IPS Correspondents
BEIJING, Sep 11 2004 (IPS)

One of China’s national population models has backtracked on the rigid “one-child” policy by allowing some couples to have their second child and launching a campaign to shatter the myth of the DINK (double-income-no-kids) family as one of prosperity and success.

Shanghai, whose population has been shrinking every year since 1993, has unveiled new family planning policies that no longer reward married couples that decide not to have children. By contrast, the metropolis now encourages 11 types of families to bear a second child and help reverse more than a decade of consecutive negative population growth.

”If every couple is unwilling to reproduce, society will by no means develop in a healthy way,” says Dr. Xia Yi, a population official with Shanghai Population and Family Planning Commission.

The threat of a rapidly greying society is looming over China’s bustling modern metropolis of 16.4 million people. Nearly 19 percent of the total population, or 2.55 million people were aged 60 or above by the end of 2003. This figure is expected to rise to 20 percent in 2005 and 33 percent by 2020.

”Unless the city can do something to change these numbers, a relatively small number of people have to support a large number of retirees within the next several years,” Xie Lingli, director of the Shanghai Population Commission said at an official briefing.

In the 1980s, 180,000 children were born every year in Shanghai. But now there are well under 60,000. Last year, the number of net births was 57,000 but the number of deaths stood at 100,700 – meaning a natural growth rate of minus 3.24 per thousand.

Population officials say the average size of families in Shanghai is also shrinking. In the 1950s, Shanghainese had on an average of five children – more than in the countryside. But in the 1970s, the city took the lead in enforcing the government’s one-child policy.

Demographers like Professor Peng Xizhe from Shanghai’s Fudan University claim that family planning was most strictly enforced in Shanghai – China’s richest city where many of the country’s wealthy entrepreneurs and capitalist endeavours had taken residence before the communist victory in 1949.

By 1979, 90 percent of Shanghai urban couples had pledged to have just one child. In the 1980s, Shanghai, including its rural areas where five million of its 14 million live, had achieved a fertility rate of 1.6 children per woman – a rate only now seen in mature Western European countries like Italy.

Given Shanghai’s role as national population model, family planning officials were eager to promote the virtues of the DINK family as a paragon of success and social well-being. A financial compensation was given to married couples that decided to remain childless. The efforts have paid off so well that many young people, especially young women who received better education, chose not to bear children at all.

According to a survey carried out by the Shanghai Municipal Women’s Federation, the number of traditional Chinese households in which three generations live under one roof has been steadily diminishing. DINK families in Shanghai, on the other hand, accounted for 12.4 percent of all households in 2003.

The trend mirrors demographic shifts in all big cities in China. There are now at least 600,000 DINK couples in China, mainly in big metropolises such as Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin and Guangzhou. In Beijing, about 10 percent of young married couples say they do not intend to have children.

”It is not only about the cost of educating and supporting a child,” says Xu Jie, a career Beijing woman in her early 30s.

”It is also about the freedom of choice. There is much less pressure from the society on us to become mothers and it is kind of precious and worth enjoying,” she tells IPS. ”Even my parents are not so belligerent any more about me producing the family heir.”

Renowned sociologist Professor Li Yinhe believes the increasing number of DINK families is an indication that these days there is more room for Chinese people to choose their own lifestyle.

”People who choose not to have children pay more attention to present happiness. They cherish their relationship with their spouse more than parenthood,” Li told the official ‘Xinhua News Agency’.

But fewer children in big metropolises like Shanghai are causing headaches for population officials as they struggle to balance state-endorsed birth control with the growing number of elderly.

Fears are mounting that without a growing population, Shanghai’s vast stock of sprawling housing, office blocks and top-notch infrastructure will remain under-used.

Another worry is Shanghai’s army of migrant workers who were brought in to carry out the city’s radical reconstruction in the 1990s. While the city’s natural growth has been negative for the past 11 years, a growing influx of migrants has pushed up the population and created problems of over-density, litter and crime.

To counter population pressure, Shanghai rolled out new regulations allowing 11 types of families to apply for the birth of a second child, including couples where both the husband and wife are single children in their families.

Another eligible group are spouses that have remarried and wish to have a child in their second marriage.

According to statistics of the Shanghai Population and Family Planning Commission, the new policies unveiled in April resulted in a big jump in applications from couples wanting to have a second child.

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