China to improve population policy

BEIJING - China will gradually improve the country's population policy in accordance with its actual conditions, a spokesman for the country's family planning authority said Friday.

Adjustments to the existing policy will be made on the basis of ample research and survey results to adapt to "economic and social development as well as long-term and balanced population development," Deng Haihua, spokesman for the National Health and Family Planning Commission, told a regular press conference.

The commission will introduce adjustment plans to the family planning policy "at an appropriate time," he said, citing a public health promotion plan released by the commission on Tuesday.

Deng, however, reaffirmed that China must adhere to the basic state policy of family planning.

In response to media attention on the country's population policies, Mao Qun'an, another spokesman for the commission, said last week that the government is deliberating whether to further relax the country's "one-chid policy" by allowing a couple in which only one party is an only child to have two children.

The family planning policy was first introduced in the late 1970s to rein in China's surging population by limiting most urban couples to one child and most rural couples to two children, if the first one is a girl.

The policy was later relaxed, with the current policy stipulating that to have a second child, both parents must be only children.