China’s Sichuan to scrap 3-child limit

Southwest China's Sichuan province will lift its three-child birth limit and remove restrictions on single parents as the world's most populous nation faces a looming demographic crisis. China's population shrank last year for the first time in more than six decades, official data released this month showed, and the nation of 1.4 billion has seen birth rates plunge to record lows as its workforce ages. China ended its strict "one-child policy" in 2016 and began allowing couples to have three children in 2021. But that has failed to reverse the demographic decline. Faced with falling birth rates, authorities in Sichuan yesterday said they would remove the limit on the number of children a family can have and lift a ban on single women registering a birth.