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posted by Fnord666 on Saturday August 11 2018, @03:20PM   Printer-friendly
from the one-of-each dept.

China hints at three-child policy with 'happy family' stamps

Speculation is mounting in China that the country is set to further relax its two-child policy and allow people to have more children.

Postage stamps unveiled earlier this week to mark the incoming Year of the Pig in February 2019 have led many social media users to question whether a loosening of family planning restrictions could be imminent.

The stamps show a parent pig couple and three piglets. On the surface, it hardly appears to be a policy announcement. But users on the popular Sina Weibo microblog have pointed out that two years ago, before the one-child policy was abolished, China issued Year of the Monkey stamps featuring two baby monkeys.

And in recent months, the Chinese government has been strongly encouraging couples to have more than one child. Local authorities have even been offering incentives, such as tax breaks, and education and housing subsidies.

A 2015 UN report projected that China's population would decline to about 1 billion by 2100, although some experts put the number even lower.

Related: China's 'Missing Girls' Theory Likely Far Overblown, Study Shows


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  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 12 2018, @02:24AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 12 2018, @02:24AM (#720429)

    There's a reason for that. It's called neoliberalism, and the confusion is intentional. The intention, of course, is to drive down wages. Neoliberalism takes positions every now and then such as on the environment that happen to coincide with the right thing to do. In this case, the real reasons have nothing to do with the environment, and that is reflected by their broader policies.

    The criticism of Al Gore's private jet, for example, comes from an important place of intuition. The working class does not have ownership over our labor, so how could we possibly do anything serious about tackling pollution like allocating our wealth for biodiesel independent of the corn industry? Instead, the neoliberals tell us not to have children, then they import immigrants (who may not have some of the high notions about labor organization somebody who grew up in the US would have) to drive down wages (while unions become corrupt and part of the effort to drive down wages), all while repeating NO MONEY for things like serious biodiesel research (algae or whatever else that's better than corn) and social programs and continuing to dump an amount that is creeping up towards a trillion dollars per year (just around $300 shy this year) on foreign wars of capitalist imperialism and oil.

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