WHEN China announced it was relaxing its one-child policy in late 2013, Beijing-based marketing director Kang Lu chatted with her husband about whether they wanted a second baby.

    “But given our current circumstances, we quickly abandoned the idea,” she said. “It wasn’t a tough decision.”

    They weren’t alone. The overall response to the policy change has been tepid. While some have quickly availed themselves of it, many, including the Kang family, have not done so for various reasons, including inadequate childcare, high costs of bringing up another child, age, and even objections from the only child.

    Chinese media reported last week that a 13-year-old girl in central Henan Province attempted suicide and forced her mother, who was 13 weeks pregnant, to abort a baby.

    Experts say this only underlines a looming demographic crisis in China: low fertility rates, a rapidly aging population and a shrinking labor force will inevitably put immense strains on the economy in the decades ahead, and on the government’s ability to pay people’s pensions.

    Yet for many urban couples in modern China, having a second child is no longer an attractive option.

    There are no kindergartens in Kang’s neighborhood for children under 3 while the market for nannies is unregulated, and tales of neglect are rife. Kang’s parents had moved to Beijing for three years to help look after her first child, a girl, but now feel too old to help.

    Kang also has ambitions for advancing her career, but was faced with the prospect of giving up those ambitions — or giving up her job entirely — to care for a second child. In Beijing’s soaring housing market, Kang and her husband certainly couldn’t afford a larger apartment, which they figured they would need if they had a boy. And they were worried that the capital’s smoggy air could affect a new baby’s health.

    “The joy and happiness my daughter brought us is worth anything,” she said. “I am 36 and I know this could be my last chance to have another baby. But I very much doubt the joy of having another baby would outweigh these practical obstacles.

    “Besides, I am an only child,” she said. “In my mind, one child is good enough.”

    China’s controversial one-child policy was introduced in 1980 but was partially relaxed just over a year ago amid mounting fears of an aging population and shrinking labor force.

    Under the new rules, couples in China are allowed a second child if either parent was an only child. Rural couples can have a second if their first child is a girl.

    The new policy was rolled out around the country during 2014, with Beijing one of the first provinces to relax the rules. Still, only 6.7 percent of eligible couples in the capital applied for permission to have a second child in the 10 months since the rules changed; nationally, take-up was higher, but with fewer than 1 million couples applying, it was still below government forecasts.

    The data reflect how a combination of the one-child policy, rapid urbanization and rising incomes have dramatically reduced fertility rates in China. That may have stabilized the country’s population, but it has brought in its wake a whole new set of problems. As its population ages, China is racing toward a “demographic precipice,” says Wang Feng, a professor of sociology at the University of California at Irvine.

    The nation’s fertility rate, of 1.4 children per woman, is way below that of the United States and the developed world average, and will lead inexorably to a rapid aging of society: that means a substantial decline in the supply of young labor to power the economy, and a rapidly escalating number of old people.

    As the economy slows, government revenue growth will slow, even as the financial burden from the elderly rises. Sooner or later, he says, that means the government will simply run out of money to pay for pensions, or finance growing health-care costs.

    “And I am not talking about the long and distant future — I am really talking about the next 10 or 15 years,” he says.

    China’s working population fell for a third straight year in 2014, declining by 3.7 million to 916 million people, according to data released this week, in a trend that is expected to accelerate in years ahead. Meanwhile, the number of people aged 60 and above will approach 400 million, or a quarter of the population, in the early 2030s, according to United Nations forecasts, from one-seventh now.

    In December, a group of more than 50 leading demographers came together in Shanghai to appeal for further relaxation in family planning policy, though experts say that even a total abandonment of the one-child policy tomorrow would do nothing to relieve the problem for decades.

    Mao Qun’an, the chief spokesman for the government’s National Health and Family Planning Commission, maintains that the size of China’s population is still a more pressing problem than the fact that it is aging. The family planning policy would be relaxed further over time, but the government has no timetable in mind.

    Wang says the spokesman is “deeply trapped in the outdated belief in birth control.” He complains that “incompetent, irresponsible and unaccountable officials” refuse to change a policy that has caused untold misery and will soon have serious economic and political consequences.

    Birth rates in East Asia are generally low, demographers point out, and an aging population has already emerged as a problem in Japan. In China, families’ driving ambitions for their offspring to succeed means many parents are happier to concentrate on a single child.

    “My husband and I provide everything we can for our daughter,” Kang said. “We pay for her to go to her favorite ballet class. We plan to send her overseas when she grows up. But if we had another baby, I don’t think we could do all this for both of them.”

    Gender imbalace is also a serious issue facing China.

    Chinese health authorities last week described the gender imbalance among newborns as “the most serious and prolonged” in the world, a direct ramification of the country’s strict one-child policy.

    The statement will add to growing calls for the government to scrap all family planning restrictions.

    Like most Asian nations, China has a traditional bias for sons. Many families abort female foetuses and abandon baby girls to ensure their one child is a son, so about 118 boys are born for every 100 girls, against a global average of 103 to 107.

    “Our country has the most serious gender imbalance that is most prolonged and affecting the most number of people,” the National Health and Family Planning Commission said in a statement on its website.

    The agency said it would step up supervision on foetal sex determination, which is banned in China. It acknowledged that women were transferring blood samples overseas to determine the genders of their babies as part of an “underground chain for profit.”

    “This has further exacerbated the gender imbalance in our country’s birth structure,” the agency said.

    Researchers have warned that large sex-ratio imbalances could lead to instability as more men remain unmarried, raising the risks of anti-social and violent behaviour.(SD-Agencies)