Ch Wu Jianmin, a spokesman for the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, an advisory body to China’s parliament, created an international stir earlier this week when he announced that China might consider changes to its one-child policy. 

Since then Zhang Weiqing, the top official in charge of family planning, has denied the rumors, telling a Chinese news source that “Changes to the family planning policy now could lead to population rises, posing higher pressure on China's future development."

But, as Robert Engelman noted in a recent blog post for Worldwatch, a change in China’s one-child policy might not lead to a major surge in population growth.  The number of children desired by Chinese couples has almost certainly declined in the years since the policy was first instituted.  Without coercion, fertility rates in other parts of East Asia have fallen dramatically in recent decades; couples in China today might also desire much smaller families. As Engelman observes in his posting:

Paradoxically, women in Taiwan and in the special administrative regions of Hong Kong and Macao actually have about one child on average, and the one-child policy has never been a factor for these populations. True, they’re not fully comparable to China’s population as a whole, but their hyper-low fertility does speak to the feasibility of achieving lower fertility based not on coercive policies but on the reproductive choices of couples and individuals and good access to family planning services.

As Engelman notes, “Chinese women and couples undoubtedly want the same high-quality health care and contraceptive options that women do elsewhere in the world. Whether an end to global population growth is imminent has much more to do with policies in all countries that help people reach those aspirations than with policies in any one country…”