One child policy

Chinese families used to have an average of four children each, but life changed radically in 1979, when a law was introduced dictating that most parents could only have one child. Last week, we learned that the policy will now be relaxed, after being enforced across the world's most populous country for more than a generation.

On the township roads, there are slogans written on flamboyant red banners, telling people to have fewer children and raise more pigs. Many parents even stopped questioning why they couldn't have more than one child and forgot that things had ever been different.

In 1979, when the policy was first unveiled, the new rules were a major adjustment for those accustomed to large families. But children growing up under the policy were unaware of this. And in the early years, the parents of most new single children came from large families - so instead of siblings the children were able to forge close relationships with cousins.

The first singletons born under the one-child policy experienced other changes, too, apart from the absence of brothers and sisters.

Every family suddenly had a huge amount of discretionary income to invest in education and also in consumption. The resources that had been spread among several children in past generations were now focused on one child.

The result - China's new singletons were more educated than generations before them. And Chinese education costs soared overnight. In the past, parents would usually choose just one of their children to progress in school. But after the one-child policy came into practice, each single child shouldered this focused pressure from two parents.

"It is not that we don't want to raise more children, it is that we cannot create that many opportunities for them. If I cannot create that much opportunity for my children, I think that my children will feel lost in competition against other children," a mother says.

Although the one-child policy is still in place for many in China, it is possible that one day in the not-too-distant future, China's one-child generation will become a chapter in the country's history books.

But even when that happens, the ultimate verdict as to whether China's singletons were hurt by the policy, or benefited from it, may still be the subject of debate.