Officials in Guangzhou, China, and in other regions of the country are urging couples who both have no siblings to have two children in an attempt to address issues raised by the increasingly aging population in the country, Duan Jianhua, deputy director of family planning in Guangzhou, said recently, the China Daily reports (Qiu, China Daily, 11/10). China's one-child-per-family policy seeks to keep China's population, now 1.3 billion, at about 1.7 billion by 2050. Ethnic minorities and farmers are the only groups legally exempt from the rule nationwide (Kaiser Daily Women's Health Policy Report, 11/1). The National Population and Family Planning Commission in 2000 instituted a policy allowing couples from one-child families in 27 provinces to have two children. "This is not a local policy; the encouragement we are giving conforms with the national family planning system," Duan said. He added, "With both parents coming from one-child families, these couples will bear full responsibility for looking after their parents and children. ... As a result, many prefer even having no children to having two" (China Daily, 11/10). According to AFP/Yahoo! News, the policy to allow some couples to have two children is motivated in part by long-term economic concerns associated with an aging society. A 2000 census found about 7% of the population is age 65 or older and forecasts predict that 25% of the population, or 400 million people, will be in the age group by 2050, AFP/Yahoo! News reports. Wang Guixin, a professor of population studies at Fudan University, said although the policy of allowing two children in some cases has been adopted in many regions in China, it has not been implemented on a national level. He added that it is too early to say that the one-child policy will end (Harmsen, AFP/Yahoo! News, 11/10).