China is deliberating over further relaxing the country's one-child policy by allowing a couple, of which only one person is the only child, to have two children, a health and family planning official said.
Replying to a question on the country's population policies, Mao Qun'an, the health ministry's spokesperson added: "The current policy requires that to have a second child, the father and the mother must be only children."
Mao said that China must adhere to the basic state policy of family planning for a long period of time.
He said the population would continue to put pressure on and strain the economy, society, resources and the environment.
It is because the country's basic conditions still include a huge population, weak economic foundations, sparse per capita resources and insufficient environmental capacity, Mao added.
He, however, said one of the recently restructured commission's major tasks lies in improving the family planning policy. It is organising surveys and studies on the correlations between the size, quality, structure and distribution of Chinese population.
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To improve population policies, Mao said, China must maintain the current low birth rate while also taking into consideration the public's needs, social and economic development, and changes in the population structure.
The family planning policy was first introduced in the late 1970s to rein in China's surging population by encouraging late marriages and pregnancies, as well as limiting most urban couples to one child and most rural couples to two children, if the first one is a girl.
Under the policy, most couples born in urban areas in the 1980s come from single-child families.
The policy was relaxed around 2007, allowing couples in all Chinese provinces, autonomous regions and municipalities, except for Henan province, in which both parents come from single-child families to give birth to two children.
Henan province adopted the relaxed family planning policy in 2011.