Three-child policy: China lifts cap on births per family

A mother and her baby playing on a slide at Wukesong shopping district in Beijing

China said on Monday that married couples may have up to three children, a major policy shift from the existing limit of two after recent data showed a dramatic decline in births in the world's most populous country. Beijing scrapped its decades-old one-child policy in 2016, replacing it with a two-child limit that failed to result in a sustained surge in births given the high cost of raising children in Chinese cities - a challenge that remains. ‘To further optimise the birth policy, (China) will implement a one-married-couple-can-have-three-children policy,’ the official Xinhua news agency said in a report following a politburo meeting chaired by President Xi Jinping. The policy change will come with ‘supportive measures, which will be conducive to improving our country's population structure, fulfilling the country's strategy of actively coping with an ageing population and maintaining the advantage, endowment of human resources’, Xinhua said.