BIG CHANGE

China to Ease One-Child Policy

In major reform of several laws.

After years of criticism from Western human rights groups, China’s Communist Party announced Friday that it plans to relax the country’s one-child policy, now allowing Chinese couples to have two children. The controversial law was instated in the 1970s to control China’s enormous population, but was sometimes brutally enforced and resulted in a wide gender gap in Chinese society. The Party also said it would abolish its “re-education through labor” program, where people can be sentenced without trial to years in labor camps—another institution hated by the Chinese people and criticized by human rights groups. The Third Plenium, a large meeting of the Communist Party, also made plans to reduce “step by step” the number of crimes subject to the death penalty.