China's Latest Population Move, Permitting a Couple to Have 3 Children, Should Raise Alarm Bells Posted on After 35 years, the Chinese Communist Party loosened the notorious one-child policy in 2015. On Monday, China weakened the notorious and barbaric one-child policy even further, but Western social scientist Steven Mosher (who studied the policy in China when it began in 1980) warned that President Xi Jinping is likely to launch a similarly barbaric policy in the opposite direction. “To actively respond to the aging of the population … a couple is permitted to have three children,” China’s state media outlet Xinhua reported on Monday. Xi and the Communist Party’s politburo made the decision recently.