Despite having the largest population of any country in the world, China isn't having enough babies. That's the unspoken conclusion of a government plan, published Wednesday, which revealed that the relaxation of China's one-child-only policy has so far failed to boost the country's birth rate enough to avoid significant demographic challenges in the coming decades. The easing of the one-child policy, which was amended in early 2016 to allow all Chinese families to have two children, helped push the number of births in the country to 17.86 million in 2016, an increase of 7.9 percent over 2015, according to state media reports citing China's National Health and Family Planning Commission. The figure was the highest since 2000. Other data released by China's National Bureau of Statistics recorded a slightly higher figure of 18.46 million births in 2016. Despite the increase, China's fertility rate remains below replacement level — at which a population naturally replenishes itself from one generation to the next — where it has languished for years, according to the National Population Development Plan 2016 - 2030, issued by China's State Council, the country's cabinet.



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Despite state media trumpeting the increase as evidence of the two-child policy's success, the increase in births is lower than the figure of 20 million for which authorities had hoped — and even that figure would not have allowed the country to sidestep the demographic train rolling toward it. The report released Wednesday warns that China faces a turning point over the next 15 years, particularly between 2021 and 2030. The aging of the population will accelerate, increasing pressure on social security and public services. At the same time, the working-age population will shrink, damaging economic growth and reducing the tax income required to support the elderly.

The report predicted that a quarter of China's population will be over 60 in 2030, compared with about 16 percent in 2015. More from NBC News:

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