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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
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 12 2018, @04:35AM
As a former stamp collector, it's interesting to me to see which countries these days still try to use their stamp issuing program as part of their governmental propaganda system. Most countries in the West, as well as in the third world, use it as pretty labels to pry money out of the declining number of stamp collectors in the world; though they're still used to send the mail, they're not used much to send a message.
Back when I still collected, one of the areas I got into was collecting the stamps issued by the various countries involved in fighting WWII. It was startling how many stamps the Axis countries put out, as compared to the Allies. The Axis used their stamps to get their governments' world view out not just to their citizens, but to mail recipients around the world, particularly Germany (and no, it wasn't all just Hitler stamps). The Allies by comparison put out very few war-related stamps. Apparently they were concentrating on winning the war, not on propagandizing about it.
It would be interesting to know how much mail volume there is in China, where stamp images can still be used to communicate what the government considers to be important. Ah well, forgive my rambling.