Maximum, that is.
1 child policy from 1979 to 2015.
2 child policy from 2015 to 2021.
3 child policy since 2021.
The announcement came after the release of the results of the Seventh National Population Census, which showed that the number of births in mainland China in 2020 was only 12 million, the lowest number of births since 1960, and the further aging of the population, against which the policy was born.[5] This was the slowest population growth rate China experienced.[6]
Although the CCP government had high expectations for the new policy,[16] in a 2021 online poll conducted by the state media Xinhua on its Weibo account, using the hashtag #AreYouReady for the new three-child policy, about 29,000 out of 31,000 respondents stated they would “never consider it.”[15]
While that’s all relatively nice, it’s also a bandage on a gash. The number one predictor of how high your country’s fertility rate will go in a developed economy is access to affordable housing, and to tackle that, Beijing is gonna have to do some serious teeth gritting on the fact that right now housing is in a serious speculative loop, several people will buy units still under construction because it’s seen as the safest way to store capital in the country, they went from a country that shot land lords to a country that’s technically chalk full of them.
Even saying it’s “nice” is an overstatement. With how quickly savings and jobs are vanishing and how expensive and stressful it is to raise a child, the population is more opposed to the idea of having children than ever before. Affordable housing isn’t the problem. There simply aren’t enough resources available to raise a new generation. The government will have to come up with something new if they want to prevent an all out crash of their economy because there is no way in hell the few young people will be able to support the massive aging population in the coming 2 decades.
Source on that claim, that affordable housing is the predictor of fertility.
CHALK!
Chock-full.