From Asia Times Online (link):
Fixated on maintaining the country’s high-powered economic growth, Chinese policymakers have been soliciting opinions from economists about how to avoid future labor shortages by relaxing and even scrapping the rigid one-child policy. But the effort has generated a debate over a 25-year-old family-planning policy that was once considered sacrosanct.
Population experts have clashed with economists about what path China – a nation of 1.3 billion with scarce farmland and water supplies – should take to maintain a healthy economic growth and delay the arrival of a graying society without creating another population explosion.
China’s one-child policy, which the government started implementing in 1979, is widely unpopular inside the country. In the West, it has been criticized for being prone to abuses, with local officials using coercion and forced abortions to enforce their state-mandated family-planning quotas.
