雅思阅读练习：the population of China_雅思
爱思学雅思网第一时给大家带来了雅思阅读练习：the population of China。希望以下内容能够为同学们的雅思备考提供帮助。爱思学雅思网将第一时间为大家发布最新、最全、最专业的雅思报名官网消息和雅思考试真题及解析，供大家参考。
The most surprising demographic crisis
A new census raises questions about the future of China’s one-child
policy
DOES China have enough people? The question might seem absurd. The country
has long been famous both for having the world’s largest population and for
having taken draconian measures to restrain its growth. Though many people,
Chinese and outsiders alike, have looked aghast at the brutal and coercive
excesses of the one-child policy, there has also often been a grudging
acknowledgment that China needed to do something to keep its vast numbers in
check.
But new census figures bolster claims made in the past few years that China
is suffering from a demographic problem of a different sort: too low a birth
rate. The latest numbers, released on April 28th and based on the nationwide
census conducted last year, show a total population for mainland China of 1.34
billion. They also reveal a steep decline in the average annual population
growth rate, down to 0.57% in 2000-10, half the rate of 1.07% in the previous
decade. The data imply that the total fertility rate, which is the number of
children a woman of child-bearing age can expect to have, on average, during her
lifetime, may now be just 1.4, far below the “replacement rate” of 2.1, which
eventually leads to the population stabilising.
Slower growth is matched by a dramatic ageing of the population. People
above the age of 60 now represent 13.3% of the total, up from 10.3% in 2000 (see
chart). In the same period, those under the age of 14 declined from 23% to 17%.
A continuation of these trends will place ever greater burdens on the working
young who must support their elderly kin, as well as on government-run pension
and health-care systems. China’s great “demographic dividend” (a rising share of
working-age adults) is almost over.
In addition to skewing the country’s age distribution, the one-child policy
has probably exacerbated its dire gender imbalance. Many more baby boys are born
in China than baby girls. China is not unique in this; other countries, notably
India, have encountered similar problems without coercive population controls.
But Chinese officials do not dispute that the one-child policy has played a
role. China’s strong cultural imperative for male offspring has led many
families to do whatever they must to ensure that their one permissible child is
a son. In the earliest days of the one-child policy, this sometimes meant female
infanticide. As ultrasound technology spread, sex-selective abortions became
widespread.
The new census data show that little progress is being made to counter this
troubling trend. Among newborns, there were more than 118 boys for every 100
girls in 2010. This marks a slight increase over the 2000 level, and implies
that, in about 20 or 25 years’ time, there will not be enough brides for almost
a fifth of today’s baby boys—with the potentially vast destabilising
consequences that could have.
The census results are likely to intensify debate in China between the
powerful population-control bureaucracy and an increasingly vocal group of
academic demographers calling for a relaxation of the one-child policy. Their
disagreement involves not only the policy’s future, but also (as so often in
China) its past.
One of the academics, Wang Feng, director of the Brookings-Tsinghua Centre
for Public Policy, argues that China’s demographic pattern had already changed
dramatically by the time the one-child policy began in 1980. The total fertility
rate had been 5.8 in 1950, he notes, and had declined sharply to 2.3 by 1980,
just above replacement level.
Other countries achieved similar declines in fertility during the same
period. The crucial influences, Mr Wang reckons, are the benefits of
development, including better health care and sharp drops in high
infant-mortality rates which led people to have many children in order to ensure
that at least some would survive. By implication, coercive controls had little
to do with lowering fertility, which would have happened anyway. Countries that
simply improved access to contraceptives—Thailand and Indonesia, for
instance—did as much to reduce fertility as China, with its draconian policies.
Taiwan, which the government in Beijing regards as an integral part of China,
cut its fertility rate as much as China without population controls.
The government denies the one-child policy was irrelevant. It insists that,
thanks to the policy, 400m births were averted which would otherwise have taken
place, and which the country could not have afforded. Ma Jiantang, head of
China’s National Bureau of Statistics, insisted “the momentum of fast growth in
our population has been controlled effectively thanks to the family-planning
policy.”
There are many reasons for the government’s hard-line defence of its
one-child policy. One is a perhaps understandable view that China is unique, and
that other countries’ experience is irrelevant. A second is that, though the
policy may not have done much to push fertility down at first, it might be
keeping it low now. A third is that, if controls were lifted, population growth
might rise. In fact, there is little justification for such fears: in practice,
the one-child policy varies from place to place; it hardly applies to China’s
minorities and is more lightly applied in rural areas—and there is no population
boom in those parts.
Anyway, argues Joan Kaufman of the Heller School for Social Policy and
Management at Brandeis University, official support for the policy is only
partly to do with its perceived merits: it is also the product of resistance by
China’s family-planning bureaucracy. This has massive institutional clout (and
local governments have a vested interest in the fines collected from violators).
“The one-child policy is their raison d’tre,” says Ms Kaufman.
Mr Wang and his colleagues argue the one-child policy should go. The target
reductions in fertility rates were reached long ago. Current rates, he says, are
below replacement levels and are unsustainable. The time has come for the first
big step: a switch to a two-child policy. Research by his group suggests few
families in China would choose to have more than two.
There are signs that the academics are succeeding in their campaign to make
the population debate less politicised and more evidence-based. Mr Ma of the
National Statistics Bureau spoke not only of adhering to the family-planning
policy, but also of “cautiously and gradually improving the policy to promote
more balanced population growth in the country”. In his comments on the census,
President Hu Jintao included a vague hint that change could be in the offing.
China would maintain a low birth rate, he said. But it would also “stick to and
improve” its current family-planning policy. That hardly seems a nod to a
free-for-all. But perhaps a “two-for-all” may not be out of the question.
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