CHANGE: Enforcers of China’s One-Child Policy Are Now Cajoling People to Have Three.

Using coercion and fines, China was adept at preventing couples from having children during the decades of its one-child policy. It has been less successful in fostering a “birth-friendly society.”

Births in China continue to fall despite the government’s efforts to shift away from birth restrictions to encouraging all couples to have three children. With a drop in its population last year, China is ceding its long-held title as the world’s most populous country to India.

Chinese births have gone from around 18 million a year in 2016, when the one-child policy was scrapped, to below 10 million now, a drop of 46%. Even during starvation years in the early 1960s, when China’s population was less than half what it is now, births never fell below 10 million.

China seems determined to grow much older before it grows rich.