BEIJING // China must continue to enforce its one-child policy until new rules allowing all couples to have two children go into effect, the family planning body said.
The ruling Communist Party said last week that Beijing would loosen its decades-old policy.
The plan for the change must be approved by the parliament during its annual session in March.
Several parents are lukewarm about the idea of having a second child when the new policy came into effect.
But e-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holding, which runs China’s most popular online shopping websites and collects reams of data about consumers, said searches for books about conception and pregnancy leapt 100 times the day after the announcement and continued to grow.
The online statement by the National Health and Family Planning Commission contradicts a remark by a family planning official in the southern province of Hunan, who said last week that couples currently pregnant with a second child will not be punished, according to the Hunan Daily newspaper.
“Ahead of [ratification], all localities and departments must seriously implement the population and family planning laws and regulations currently in effect, maintain good order for births and must not act of their own accord,” a commission official said.
About 90 million families may qualify for the new two-child policy, which would help raise the population to an estimated 1.45 billion by 2030, the planning commission has said.
China, the world’s most populous nation, had 1.37 billion people at the end of last year.
For decades, China implemented the one-child policy, but loosened the norm in late 2013, allowing couples to have a second child where one partner was an only child.
* Reuters
