China to coordinate family planning policy
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Chinese Vice Premier Li Keqiang said Tuesday that China would coordinate its national family planning policy, stabilizing an appropriately low birth rate and improving the quality of its population.
"The fact remains that China has a large population. The issue of population is always a major issue for China's social and economic development," said Li at a seminar marking the 30th anniversary of the Family Planning Association of China in Beijing.
The government must solve the issue in a way that takes into consideration the whole picture of China's long-term social and economic development, he said.
Chinese government statistics show China's population stood at 1.32 billion at the end of 2008, which was about 2.5 times the number in 1949 when the People's Republic of China was founded.
The Chinese government adopted a family planning policy in the late 1970s which basically permits most urban households to have only one child.
The policy had helped China's total population increase less than 40 percent between 1978 and 2008, whereas it nearly doubled between 1949 and 1978.
Li said the government would make efforts to improve the quality of the population, optimize the population structure and spur the rational distribution of the people, so as to turn the pressure of the population into an advantage of human resources.
He also said the government would launch measures to narrow the widening ratio of men to women and address problems arising with an aging population.
The population aged at or above 60-years-old will top 200 million by the end of 2015, government reports showed.
