By 2050, analysts predict one in four people in China will be retired and the working population will have shrunk by 10%, with huge economic implications

Ming Ming, a boisterous six-year-old, longs to have a playmate, but his mother is adamant that she will not have another child.

“No way! One is quite enough,” Li Hong gasps. “Childcare, after-school activities, tutoring … you want them to have a good education but it costs money. We’re just ordinary working folks, not the super-rich. The cost of bringing up two kids would kill us!” says the 43-year-old supermarket cashier from the southern province of Guangdong.

Li herself was born just before the one-child policy began in 1980. As an only child, she says the cost of bringing up her son on top of caring for her elderly parents and those of her husband were her […]