China decides to abolish 1-child policy, allow 2 children

I'm happy that China eventually lift this policy. You know, the pressure of raising one more child is unbearable in current China. Only those with both enough money and idle time can consider to have one more kid - unfortunately, most people cannot meet the criteria and government can't provide much help.

This is probably not going to solve any of China's problems, since the aborting of female fetuses has become so common, it's just like to aggravate the horrendous male-female imbalance (which has become a serious problem in South Korea as well). One figure I've seen bandied about (although quite some time ago) was that China is already fated to be stuck with something like 60 million males who will be unable to find spouses. That, needless to say, is more than the population of most countries.

I have a lot of Chinese friends ... and most of them has at least one sibling. They tell me the one child policy seemed to be for the lower classes. They told me it is something like the first child is free, they must pay for the second one and yet more money for the third one.

Anyway ... As seen on TV, China has all those "instant" cities sitting empty ... and need people from anywhere to fill them up. Lots of empty condominiums over there in China. Thus a new outburst of babies ... who years later might move in.

With even more people perhaps someday somebody might move in and give the real estate people some breathing room ...

They tell me the one child policy seemed to be for the lower classes

Yeah, there has always been ways around it for those with money.

Regarding the 'empty' cities, my Chinese client was telling me that the problem is that the current generation's parents/grandparents were primarily focused on just getting enough to eat, and therefore had zero money management skills. Then suddenly in the past 30 years, there has been a huge influx of money into the country, but not enough people with the knowledge on how to 'have' money, and so they end up with messed up waste and priorities. It's going to take a couple of generations to work out - assuming they don't collapse in the meantime.

"rural couples were allowed two children if their firstborn was a girl."

And this was an actual government policy, albet an unelected government policy.