China babyREUTERS/Kai Pfaffenbach
One of China's totemic social policies is about to be abandoned.
The one-child policy that, as the name suggests, limits each couple to one child, is going to be dropped.
According to Xinhua News Agency, the Chinese Communist Party's central committee has scrapped the stricture. Couples will now be able to have two children.
The rule was brought in back in 1978, and fully implemented in 1980, to tackle the country's perceived overpopulation.
There have always been some exemptions to the rule, and it was relaxed in recent years but not totally abandoned.
Back in August 2013, China's Family Planning Commission began studying proposals to lift the ban if either parent were an only child, according to Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, with rumours that the ban could be lifted on all families, as it has been now.
There's a one-word answer to why the country is now lifting the rule: demographics.
The country now has a particularly poor dependency for an emerging market, with a large ageing population heading toward retirement and not as many workers entering the labour force.
From this year, the ratio of workers for each person either too young or too old to work (known as the dependency ratio) will begin to decline, limiting Chinese economic growth.
Here's how that ratio looks:
China dependency ratioBarclays
The lifting of the one-child policy could actually make the dependency ratio worse for some time, though, because it takes a long time for those new children to be old enough to work.
Before the reforms came in, during the Mao era, Chinese families were encouraged to have several children, in an attempt to boost China's industrialisation and fill the ranks of the country's military. In fact, as recently as the mid-1960s, the number of live births per woman hit nearly six, an incredibly high fertility rate.