Monks without a temple

Monks without a temple
- March 14, 2013
- Wang Feng, sociology professor, is quoted in The Economist March 16, 2013
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From The Economist:
For more than three decades the bureaucrats who enforce China’s one-child policy
have been among the most ubiquitous, and the most despised, in the country. They are
now to lose much of their power, after a government reshuffle announced on March 10th.
The question is whether this is the beginning of the end of the one-child policy itself...
Wang Feng, a demographer and director of the Brookings-Tsinghua Center for Public
Policy in Beijing, believes that public sentiment will eventually force the end of
the policy and that the government’s reshuffle has started the countdown. Up to 500,000
people on the family-planning payroll—the “monks” of the one-child policy, as Mr Wang
calls them—have “lost their temple”, he says (a little prematurely). Those who work
in the health-care system are much more competent than those in family planning, he
adds, so the family planners are more likely to lose their jobs.
For the full story, please visit http://www.economist.com/news/china/21573579-china-may-have-begun-long-e....
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