China lays out family-planning schemes to boost development

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 ◆ China lays out family-planning schemes to boost development

China mapped out a three-step family-planning scheme here recently to ensure its economic development has a much more favorable climate.

Zhang Weiqing, Minister in Charge of the State Family Planning Commission, said at the National Work Conference on Family Planning that by 2005 the population of the Chinese mainland would be kept lower than 1.33 billion with an annual growth rate less than 0.9 percent.

By 2010, the total would be limited to 1.4 billion with an annual birth rate less than 1.5 percent. By 2020, the number would be kept around 1.5 billion.

Only after the three short-term objectives were realized could the imbalance between human resources and China's economic development be eased effectively, he said.

Although China's growth rate for population had dwindled for the first time below 1 percent in 1998 and its total population in 2002 was kept less than 1.3 billion as projected, the country's annual net population growth still stood around 10 million, which Zhang believed posed a long-term challenge to sustained economic development.

According to the economic blueprint of the central government, China would strive to raise its average per-capita gross domestic product to 3,000 US dollars in 2020.

"To materialize the objective, family-planning work must be a top priority," Zhang said.

In the next five years, efforts would be made to improve the reproductive health of those of child-bearing age and maintain a low population growth.

Meanwhile, the commission would strive to build a management network supported by information technologies, reform the existing capital investment mechanism and make the social security system more focused on the needs of small families.

Thanks to the implementation of family-planning policy which required most families to have only one child, the size of Chinese families had decreased greatly over the past 30 years.

To help rural families who sank into poverty if their child was physically handicapped, ill or dead, the commission said assistance should be granted.

China would accelerate its reforms of family-planning management related to migrant labor so as to boost the floating of redundant human resources between urban and rural areas.