Thanks to China's nationwide one-child policy, 400 million fewer people were born over the past three decades. The noticeable achievements are worthy of wide applause and appreciation. Quickly controlling and reducing the country's population will improve citizens' lives and shrink the gap between China and Western countries' per capita GDP and living standards. Otherwise, the unemployment, urbanization, environmental problems, deficient of resources and other issues will be much more serious than it is now.

But the goal to reduce social burden and improve the standard of living by discouraging excess population growth has only been partially achieved. Therefore, what we should do is to keep adhering to the one-child policy instead of changing it.

There has always been a divergence of opinions on whether to ease the one-child policy since it was first implemented. More and more people are starting to support a loosening of the policy, but I am strong against that proposal because it would unduly broaden the population, which will put more pressure on the environment, resources, urbanization, employment and national strength.

China now has more than 1.3 billion people. For a long period into the future, there will be about 7 million people added to the total population each year. The population will continue to expand rapidly even with a lower birth rate. The severe shortage of resources pushes us to use resources efficiently and limits the population from expanding.

Production and extensive development can no longer satisfy the social needs of a huge population expansion. We must rely on strict control and reduction of population to ease up major contradictions and employment pressure. Only by strictly applying "control-led-reduction," in which the government controls the total population at 1.5 billion or so at first and then gradually reduce it to 500 million, can we effectively alleviate China's major social and economic contradictions and tremendous employment pressures and promote the standard of living. By coordinating population and environmental resources, better sustainable development can be achieved.

A resource-efficient society and environmentally friendly society should be matched with high-skilled society that can be achieved through control-led-reduction of population. To this end, no city should be allowed to let couples where both people are only children themselves to have a second child. To ensure implementation of the one-child policy, we should abandon the current penalty system based on children born outside the one-child policy and establish a reward mechanism. The family with no child gets higher rewards, the family with a girl gets medium rewards and the family with a boy gets lower rewards or universal basic social security. The family which breaks the one-child policy gets no awards.

Meanwhile, the government should use the money saved through strict implementation of family planning to improve the living standard of the aging population. With the increase in life expectancy, we can also learn from Japan and other developed countries to postpone the retirement age.

In addition, different levels of subsidies or insurance should be given to the family with premature deaths or disabilities. Such incentives can motivate people to engage in high-risk work without any worries.

Cheng Enfu is president of the Marxism Research Institute at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

(This article was first published in Chinese and translated by Li Huiru.)

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