In late October, China announced an end to its one-child policy, opening the door to all couples to have two children.

This change has not scrapped the family planning policy altogether, but it reflects a growing concern with slow population growth and its negative repercussions.

While an aging population and a shrinking labor pool are among main domestic motivations for the change in the decadeslong one-child policy, theories about emerging trends in population have also contributed to the dramatic change in perception about population in China and elsewhere.

In The Coming Population Crash and Our Planet's Surprising Future, English author, journalist and environment consultant of New Scientist Fred Pearce says instead of the threat of population overgrowth that people born in the 1970s heard so much about, we are actually facing a population crash somewhere on the horizon.

Pearce says women are now able to take greater control of their reproductive lives.

He writes we are moving from a world where women have lots of children in the hope a couple survive, to a world where we can expect them to survive.

"This is the first time in history that they do, pretty much worldwide," Pearce says.

The change, he believes, is empowering for women, as the pressure on them from men to stay at home and have children is much less, because the next generation is much easier to secure.

Women are increasingly doing other things in their lives beyond raising kids.

He found fewer women want large families today. Even in countries like Italy, where the Catholic church does not encourage the use of contraceptives, family sizes are shrinking as nuclear families are weary of large families and the complex dynamics that characterize traditional large families.

Sexual life is increasingly for joy, not for producing children, while divorce rates are on the rise worldwide. All these factors are hurting people's motivation to have children.

With the existing base, the world population is still on the rise in the immediate future, but "not many researchers look forward far enough to see over the curve of stable population to the potential downside", according to the author.

While demographers may persist in their false projections of population rise, countries like Russia and Japan are facing strong effects of both shrinking and aging population.

Pearce says he believes there will be a turning point at which population growth will stop and begin to drop. That turning point may come before the end of the century or sooner, "given the global fertility rate is now down to around 2.4 (average number of children per woman)".

"When I wrote the book, it was 2.6," he adds.

Fertility rates are even lower in Asia, the author says, citing Shanghai as being at 0.7.

Even in regions or countries without a family planning policy, the fertility rate is also declining.

"Look at Hong Kong. No one-child policy, but the average is 1.2 babies per woman. Taiwan is 1.1," Pearce says.

He says East Asia has low fertility rates. "It is a global trend but is especially marked in East Asia." He believes cultural reasons lie behind the lukewarm attitude toward having children.

Economic pressures may also have led to couples' hesitation to have more than one child. Chinese, for instance, focus too much on giving children the best education and everything else, including down payments for young adults' housing in some cases ("nibbling the old"), which makes it "not so desirable" to have children. Most families simply cannot afford it.

"If we get toward a (population) crash, probably people will start having more children again," Pearce says.

Berlin Fang is a US-based author and columnist.

For China Daily

(China Daily 12/09/2015 page20)