Change of the demographic politics in China: reasons, results, prospects

The article deals with analysis of the changes in the state demographic policy in China after 2016, marked by permission to have two children in any Chinese family. Thirty years of one-child policy have resulted in reduction of the extremely high growth rate and population size, but caused demographic problems connected with rapid demographic aging, gender imbalance, "hidden children", "internal immigration" of rural residents to cities, deterioration of reproductive health. This complicated the socio-economic development, as it aggravated the situation on the labor market, led to reduction of consumption in pre-pension and pension ages, increased social dependency of the elderly having no modern pension security and turned children into "little emperors" that resulted in deformation of horizontal intra-family relations. In Chinese families, particularly urban, formed a "one-child" culture, when people opted to have a single child only if they were sure that both the child and the parents would be provided with a high standard of living; to opt out of such decision, the official lifting of the ban on the repeated birth alone was not enough. Part of families, mainly rural, already had two children despite the ban, and there arose a problem of their "legalization". Efficiency of new measures for demographic regulation could be enhanced by taking into account the specifics of all categories of the population capable of increasing fertility. There is need in State propaganda and material support for two-child families, while in fact the fertility-related policy remains discriminatory, focused only on traditional family couples, and aimed at limiting the population growth in the long-term prospect.