BEIJING – China has formally approved an amendment to its laws, allowing couples to have up to three children.
The regulation was passed on Friday at a meeting of the country’s top lawmakers, the National People’s Congress (NPC).
China had back in May this year announced that it would allow its citizens to have more than two children amid falling birth rate and aging population.
A major policy shift had been announced after a meeting of the Political Bureau of Communist Party of China Central Committee chaired by President Xi Jinping.
“Implementing the policy and its relevant supporting measures will help improve China’s population structure, actively respond to the aging population and preserve the country’s human resource advantages,” a Xinhua report had said.
The East Asian country had imposed the two-child policy in 2015 after it repealed the single-child policy that remained in place for around 40 years. The measures had been taken to control the population.
The permission for the third child comes after the National Bureau of Statistics of China published country’s decennial census earlier this month.
The census revealed that the population grew at its slowest rate (0.53%) during the last decade since the 1950s, to 1.41 billion.
It also showed a fertility rate of just 1.3 children per woman for 2020 alone.
