China population still growing

UK BBC news reports:

China has decided to end its decades-long one-child policy, the state-run Xinhua news agency reports.

Couples will now be allowed to have two children, it said, citing a statement from the Communist Party.

The controversial policy was introduced nationally in 1979, to slow the population growth rate.

It is estimated to have prevented about 400 million births.

So now we will have those 400M extra Chinese kids?

The population of China grew from about 900M to about 1.4 billion under its one child policy. Its population will be growing out of control for the foreseeable future. But it may be passed by India's population.

Pres. Obama is still not happy:

The White House is welcoming China's move to end its "one-child" policy but says the decision doesn't go far enough. ...

White House spokesman Josh Earnest says the shift in policy is a positive step by China. But he says the U.S. is looking forward to the day when birth limits in China are abandoned altogether.

So why does Obama want more Chinese babies? If he were really concerned about global warming and other environmental issues, then he should want to slow Chinese population growth. Or if he really believed that countries should manage their own affairs, he would assume that China is doing what is good for China.

Update: Nicholas Eberstadt of the American Enterprise Institute writes in the WSJ:

The one-child mandate is the single greatest social-policy error in human history. ...

Fertility levels in urban China were already well below replacement by 1980. Today the country is on track to go gray at a shocking tempo. Two years ago, working-age manpower began to decline, according to Chinese authorities. The only close comparator is post-bubble Japan: not a cheering vision for what remains a relatively poor society. ...

The “fatal conceit” (to borrow Friedrich Hayek’s term) of China’s population planners was that they could micro-calibrate the behavior of the men and women under their command. The new two-child policy suffers the same flaw. As long as Beijing deforms Chinese society with these misbegotten tools, the nation’s future will be compromised, poorer and sadder than it otherwise could be.

This is crazy stuff. Sure, the policy is authoritarian, but why is it so important to replace the huge expansion on China's population? China would be doing real well if it did as well as Japan.