these are the headlines. joe biden has led a ceremony in the state of oklahoma to mark the centenary of the massacre where black residents were killed by white mobs and 19 to anyone. he made no mention of reparations. >> we do ourselves no favors by pretending of this ever happened. it does still impact us today. we can't just choose to learn what we want to know. and not what we should know. [applause] the good, the bad,

everything. that is what great nations do. they come to terms with there dark sides. and we are a great nation. -- their dark sides. and we are a great nation. i come here to help fill the silence, because in silence, wounds deepen. >> more than 90% of people in ethiopia's northern region are currently in need of emergency food aid. that is a warning from the wild free program. thousands have been killed and 2 million others have been displaced since fighting began in november. europe's top disease agency is urging leaders to think about supplying vaccines to poorer nations before inoculated young people in their own countries. that is as many nations struggle to get enough vaccine supply. the u.s. secretary of state

as in costa rica as part of president joe biden's goal to tackle the root causes of migration. in a search for regional solutions. leaving spain after the high court turned down the request to be taken into custody. he is accused owar crimes including genocide. he had been in spain for medical treatment. those are the headlines. i will be here with an update after "inside story." ♪ mohammed: first, it was the one child policy. then, it became two. now, couples in china are allowed three children.

but will this be enough to reverse falling birth rates and deal with a rapidly aging population? this is "inside story." ♪ hello, and welcome to the program. i'm mohammed jamjoom. the world's most populous country is facing a crisis. china's population is aging rapidly. more people are reaching retirement age, and soon, there won't be enough young people to replace them in the workforce. worried about the implications for the economy, china's relaxed its infamous one-child policy and allowed couples to have two children. but this wasn't enough to boost population growth, so the government is now pushing a three-child policy. but many people say they can't afford to have more children. we'll bring in our guests in a moment. first, this report by katrina yu in beijing.

reporter: as thousands of children participate in festivities across china to celebrate the country's children's day, its leaders announced a policy shift encouraging families to have more of them. chinese couples can now have up to three children. it comes just weeks after national census results pointed to the slowest population growth in decades. the workforce is also rapidly shrinking, with roughly 20% of people now over the age of 60. and analysts say this could harm china's economic growth. >> this will lead to the chinese economy losing its vitality. there is an aging problem, which threatens not only china's economy, but its defense and foreign policy. previously, the chinese government predicted the economy would be double in 2035 compared with 2020, but that would be mission impossible now. reporter: beijing ended its decades-long one-child policy in 2016, raising the child limit to two, but this failed to

significantly boost the number of children being born. china's birth rate has fallen for the fourth year in a row. 12 million babies were born in 2020, short of government expectations. chinese social media pages are full of comments about the new three child limit. many are critical or ridicule the government's dramatic policy turnaround. from the 1980s until 2016, millions of women were subject to fines and even forced abortion and sterilization after having one child. in 2014, celebrity film director jiangi moore was fined more than $1 million for having three children. though these penalties no longer apply, china's rising cost of living remains a barrier for families. many are unable to afford having more than one child. increasingly, educated women are also putting off or foregoing having children altogether largely because of workplace discrimination. >> if the state really wants the birth rate, the crude birth

rate, to increase, it has to produce more welfare. reporter: the government says it will delay the retirement age and offer support to families who have more children. but to avert a looming demographic crisis, some say it may be too little, too late. katrina yu, al jazeera, beijing. ♪ mohammed: alright, let's bring in our guests. in shanghai, dan wang, chief economist at hang seng bank china. in hong kong, stuart gietel-basten, professor of social science and public policy at the hong kong university of science and technology. and in washington, d.c., sophie richardson, china director at human rights watch. a warm welcome to you all. dan, let me start with you today. do you think that this new policy is actually going to increase the birth rate in china as much as the government would like it to? >> i don't think so, because if you look at the policy introduced four years ago about

a two-child policy, it has only brought in about five million new babies and increased the birth rate temporarily from 1.5 to 1.7. but then the policy impact dissipated very quickly three years later. so this time, i think this new policy probably will bring in about two million more babies at top. the overall birth rate won't change as much. mohammed: stuart, what do you say? is this new policy likely to alter china's demographic trends? >> no, i would agree with that. i don't think that it's going to make a massive change to the overall population structure of china, whether or not we use looking at the surveys that we have, which suggest very little appetite for three or four children. or even just looking across the region, as the chinese population becomes more and more modernized and more similar to other territories around the region, of course, the appetite

for such large families is really just not there. mohammed: so the human rights watch has just released a report that found pervasive discrimination under china's two-child policy. what specific kinds of discrimination are you detailing in the report? >> well, this new report looks primarily at pregnancy-related discrimination in employment. in a nutshell, that employers don't want to hire women who either haven't had children at all or have only had one child, because they don't want to have to deal with people asking for maternity leave. and of these recent developments, it's our view that it's not just a question of the state getting out of trying to regulate reproductive rights at all, it's also a question of dealing with this kind of discrimination and leveling the playing field around things like paternity leave and really giving people the full set of rights that they need to both be

parents and participate in the economy. mohammed: dan, i just want to expand a bit more on what sophie was saying there and talk a little bit more about potential examples of discrimination in the workplace. from your vantage point, what kind of impact is this new three-child policy going to have when it comes to discrimination that women face in the workplacs in china, and does this have the potential to either increase or decrease that discrimination? >> well, for chinese companies, they practically have no incentives to hire that many women at child bearing age, because it's a very realistic problem, they're not getting compensated for all those extra costs. just think about the two maternity leaves, and now there's three maternity leaves. i can understand why companies don't want to incur that cost. and one extra point which i want to point out is that there is a trade-off between having extra babies and a women's right to

work. -- a woman's right to work. because we know that china has one of the highest women's participation retail work. and ironically, that's because of the one child policy. the parents' money had nowhere to go but how to spend all on that one child, even if it's a girl, so women got better educated and they went to work, and they enjoy working so much, so many of them decided to have fewer children. but now, there is this increased incentive from the government side to push more women to have more kids, and we know that there is still a deeply entrenched culture in china that women do most of the housework, so i am afraid, with more babies being born, a lot of women will have to decide whether they can stay in the workplace anymore. a lot of them may have to quit their job and return to be a housewife. mohammed: stuart, even if people in china were to start having more babies immediately, this

isn't going to have any kind of immediate impact on the underlying issues, is it? i mean, you're not going to see any real impact for a while, because if you're talking about, you know, babies now, that's still another at least 20 years before those people would enter the workforce, right? >> yeah, that's absolutely right. it's very easy to forget that babies don't actually work, right? babies don't pay tax. and so, any babies that are born under this new policy change, they're not going to enter the labor market realistically until the early 20s, 40s, by which time of course many things will be different. the labor market will be different. entire systems of social security will be different than the current the five-year plan. not only the five-year plan we're currently in, it will have been worked through, but then

next plans will go through. furthermore of course, the problems which exist at the moment are just going to become exacerbated. so the urban pension fund, for example, the chinese academy of social sciences themselves suggest that that's going to come unstuck and possibly come on insolvent by 2035. -- come insolvent by 2035. so having more babies is not going to fix the pension system, right? having more babies is not going to increase productivity. ving more babies is not going to improve their health care system across the country. so it requires a lot more holistic perspective and a longer term view. mohammed: sophie, i just want to talk about another issue for a moment. i mean, so you have now chinese authorities that are encouraging women to have more children and to raise birth rates in the country, but that's not happening in every part of the country, right? i mean, china has been accused of forcing women of muslim ethnic minorities to have fewer

babies, to suppress their population growth. the chinese government of course denies this, but what human rights watch found on this issue -- what has human rights watch found on this issue? >> well, maybe the best way to answer that question is to point out a concern that really sort of links these two issues, what's happening to uyghurs and other turkic muslim communities, but what's happening with the decision to shift to a three-child policy. you know, 10 years ago, if we'd been having this discussion, i think we probably all would have agreed that the abolition of the two-child policy to move to the three-child policy was inconceivable. but we probably also would have agreed that the chinese government committing crimes against humanity in xinjiangri against turkic communities was equally implausible. but i think one concern is now watching government's policies in xinjiang and on reproductive rights is the prospect, that the authorities may start obliging women to have children, that will go from having impositions on the number of children that you have, to requiring people to

have certain numbers of children. and we've seen reproductive policies play out in different regions, but there are concerns about sterilizations and other reproductive related abuses. in xinjiang. mohammed: dan, the fact that the population in china is aging and that the available labor pool is shrinking, what are the ramifications of that for china's economy overall? >> the immediate impact is that there will be a declining trend in consumption, and the aging population means the innovation capacity will also be declining in a few years. but then, for the long term, i actually think the declining population is more of a blessing than a curse for china. otherwise, unemployment will have become a bigger problem. if we look at china's labor market now, for many of the sectors, we are having a labor surplus problem, not a labor shortage.

for example, if you look at each industry usually, the coder's age is kept at 35. if you're above 35 years old, you're not going to be hired by many companies as a coder. and as a researcher for college, then that similar situation, 35 years is basically an age cap, so for the next 10 years to come, china's progress to replace humans with machines will only accelerate. so we will see a temporary or seasonal shortage in the low-skilled workers along the assembly lines. but over time, this won't be a big problem. the biggest problem still would remain to be, how do we solve the pension problem 20 years down the road? because according to a un estimate, around 2035, that's the year where we'll see a peak in china's aging population, and that's where the real challenge begins. mohammed: stuart, you touched on this a little bit in your last answer, but i just want to ask, i mean, are the reasons that

people in china aren't having more children comparable to the reasons that people aren't having more children in east asia, in places like south korea, or japan, or singapore? >> yeah, i think there's a lot of similarities, particularly in urban areas. and actually, to go back to this earlier issue about discrimination in the workplace and pregnancy discrimination, you know, i would say, yes, of course, this is a problem, and it's a real issue, but it's really symptomatic of this kind of attitude among many employees, i think, across the region, which are just not supportive of families and supportive of women making who -- women who are trying to balance work and family.

and so, there's a kind of playing out of both a kind of power dynamic, but also this very kind of skewed gender approach, as well, and the reasons in china, as well as across the rest of the region, are related to the kind of the direct costs of child bearing, of child rearing in terms of education, particularly extracurricular education is very expensive. but then also the difficulties of just getting started in life, of getting a house, of getting a decent job, of getting a kind of strong pathway. and then compared to that, you also have very high opportunity costs, as i said before, particularly for women's work and for women's careers. and this really is something common in china, urban china, but also across the region. but even -- it's not even in urban, it's not only, you know, very highly paid, highly skilled women that we're talking about here. this is even in the countryside. that's why the expectation of

kind of three or four child families in the countryside, i think he's slightlyisplaced that. in the countryside, we see many, you know, the majority of people want to give their children a better opportunity than they themselves have. so that means investing more in one or two children to give them the opportunities for education and to get a good job, rather than spreading these resources more thinly. so i think if we do see a bump in the number of third children, i suspect it may well actually be in the higher income brackets rather than in the lower income brackets, which i think many people are afraid that there will be this kind of baby boom there. mohammed: sophie, i saw you nodding along to a lot of what stuart was saying there. did you want to jump in and add to the point he was making? >> just to say that i think the experiences that we've just detailed in this new report really support what stuart and dan have said about who might benefit, or i should say it this

way, who might take advantage of these policies. but it's also so interesting to look at, as we detailed some of the state propaganda recently, that's not just encouraging women to have a second child, but really encouraging them to return to the home and be mothers and play these very traditional social roles. and when the third child announcement came through over the weekend, we were very closely watching some of the commentary on chinese social media. and, you know, and it wasn't just making fun of the decision and saying, well, this is so late, and what about all the abuses that people suffered of the one child policy? but it also really flagged up a lot of concerns about inequality and who would be able to take advantage of this policy and who wouldn't. and i think it really speaks to this point about higher income people versus what already extremely limited opportunities are available to people at the lower end of the income spectrum. mohammed: dan, the government is also promising to increase

support for families, and they've indicated that they would boost some workplace protections. what might we expect to see as a result? >> i think one of the biggest moves is the change in the tax system. because in the past, there was no tax return for families with multiple children, and then there's also no tax break for companies that hire women at child-bearing age. i think this will change very quickly. and then on top of that, there will be some social campaigns to have more support towards women, towards families that needed help. and i think it's relatively easy for governments to build more schools and build more hospitals, but it's extremely difficult for them to provide low-cost housing. they need to figure out a way to provide sufficient housing for

bigger families, and many of them will have to deal with the fact that education might be too expensive for their children to attend. so the reallocation of the education resources among different brackets of income is also going to be a very difficult issue to resolve. mohammed: stuart, from your perspective, is it at all likely that the chinese government would ever completely scrap all of the restrictions in place on how many children people can have? >> i think it will likely happen, but it i think it will take time. the announcement that we saw yesterday, i mean, it's really just the latest change, i guess, since 1984. like when the one child policy came in right at the very start of the 1980s, the first piece, the first change came in 1984, which allowed another certain

group to have two children. and these gradual changes over time. so i think that we will see that gradual shift, but remember, it's not about scrapping the one child policy or the two child policy. it's about refining or changing or adapting or even improving these policies. and you've got to realize that, firstly, i mean, like there are many tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of of officials at the local level who need to adapt, who need to reorient to this new low fertility scenario of having less work to do, frankly, but also in some cases, going from kind of, you know, restricting bursts towards supporting

bursts. and then also of course, it talks about the nature of chinese politics and chinese policy. a u-turn, a scrapping any policy completely, in some ways make some kind of gesture or some intimation about how successful this policy was in the past and so it always makes sense, rather than just getting rid of something, we will gradually see this change. but i would anticipate that maybe we'll go to a fourth child at some point in the next year or so, and then remove all restrictions maybe later on. but on the other hand, it might happen tomorrow, i don't know, but we'll just have to see. mohammed: sophie, let me ask you, there are commentators out there who do believe that this change in policy is sort of a tacit acknowledgement by the chinese government that its reproduction policies in the past have failed. do you think that's the case? >> i don't know that they're quite saying that they've failed, but clearly, they're having to grapple with the fallout of past policies.

you know, the situation exists because of the existence of the one child policy. and you know, in our view, the solution is not just scrapping the restrictions entirely, but also, you know, doing the work, for example, of promoting the idea of paternity leave, and sort of the societal change that has parents taking equal responsibility for children so that most of the burden doesn't just fall on women. but also meaningful redress for the kinds of employment discrimination that we're detailing. you know, there are numerous chinese laws on the books that should prevent this from happening, but the deck is badly stacked against women, such that, you know, their best hope even in trying to take an employer to court is to get at least some kind of superficial acknowledgement that the employer was wrong to discriminate against the woman. the fines that companies pay are so small, that they're not

likely to be deterrents, but i think there's also, you know, a real discussion to be had about the kind of horrific abuses women endured under the one child policy. the family planning authorities were notoriously abusive, you know, and actually providing some redress for that, as well. mohammed: dan, overall, what has the reaction been in china to the announcement of this new policy? and also, i just want to ask, i mean, for those who grew up as part of the one child policy generation, what must they be thinking right now? >> i'm part of that generation. my parents have only one child. i have to say, it has been quite lonely to grow up alone. and then there's a lot of pressure to satisfy the parent'' expectations, because they would want to grow up or get married, -- would want you to grow up or get married, have a child,

but then with all those economic constraints, like the high housing prices, the high cost in education, many women are deciding to get married later, if at all. and even if they get married, it's so hard to combine work with family life, so they tend to have fewer children. i think in the future, probably, we're looking at a new trajectory for china, and that the population will grow at a very slow rate, and women would have more flexibility, actually, freedom in choosing what they want, especially in urban regions. the biggest problem now i think is because of this rapid urbanization and rapid growth in women's education, there's a mismatch in gender. normally, what we call the leftover women in china are highly educated, most of them, but then for the leftover men, they're normally receiving um -- receiving fewer years of education, so there's a imbalance in the marriage market. and i think that in the future,

it will prevent the birth rate to go back to this normal trajectory. mohammed: all right, well, we have run out of time, so we're going to have to leave the conversation there. thank you so much to all of our guests today, dan wang, stuart gietel-basten, and sophie richardson. and thank you, too, for watching. you can see this and all of our previous programs again anytime by visiting our website, aljazeera.com. and for further discussion, go to our facebook page. that's facebook.com/ajinsidestory. you can also join the conversation on twitter. our handle is @ajinsidestory. from me, mohammed mjoom, and the whole team here, bye for now. ♪

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