"You still don't have a child? When I was your age, I had a child old enough to go out and buy me my cigarettes. This is what an old man said to me recently," said a Beijing business consultant, Bob Shi, aged 36, yesterday.
"That's a typical reaction," he said. "Plenty of couples don't have any children at all now. This is very, very fashionable in the cities. I have many couples among my friends who are around my age and have no child. And if a couple have a child it's very rare for this to happen before he is about 30 years old and she is about 28. The old people don't like it. My parents are pissed off with me."
The phenomenon of childless couples is one of the newest and least-publicised factors in the 20-year struggle by China to bring its huge population under control. It helped enable the Beijing government to boast yesterday - when the world's population officially hit six billion - that if it hadn't been for its family-planning policy, the world population would have hit this number three years ago.
Or as an official of the State Family Planning Commission put it yesterday: "Without taking effective measures to slow down the rapid growth of its population, China would have 300 million people more than the current figure of 1.248 billion and the `World Day of Six Billion People' would have come much earlier."
In Beijing the effect of China's one-child policy is apparent every day. Parents with more than one child are very rarely seen in the streets. "I'd be really shocked if I saw a family with three children," said a 33-year-old single woman in a travel agency. "People would actually resent it. My friends react with a sense of prejudice now if they see a family with more than one child. They think, `Why are they different from us'?"
There are an estimated 70 million only children in China now, mostly in urban centres and many in their teens. These chubby and often spoilt kids with no brothers or sisters are known as "little emperors", though some are now '`big emperors".
Their behaviour is becoming more typical of the US than China, where Confucian values emphasise obedience to parents, and special "parenting" schools and boarding schools have been set up to deal with their delinquent behaviour.
"The children of this generation will not know what it is like to have an aunt or an uncle," said the woman in the travel agency.
By the end of last year China's population growth rate had dipped under 1 per cent, the National Bureau of Statistics said yesterday. It said that since China adopted the family planning policy in 1980, the birth rate dropped from 33.43 per thousand to 16.06 per thousand last year.
The bureau forecast that China's population would peak at around 1.5 billion in 40 years when it achieves zero population growth.
China's huge base population means it will still add 10 million people each year for decades, the official China Daily also reported yesterday. China had a quarter of the world's population in 1988, but only one-fifth of it by 1998. The one-child policy was introduced because of fears that China could not feed all its people from having only 7 per cent of the world's arable land. Experts who met at a population symposium in Beijing on Monday agreed the policy would have to remain in place for a long time.
Beijing has in fact begun to relax gradually but systematically the one-child policy, which has drawn criticism around the world for the harsh methods sometimes used to enforce it. These include compulsory sterilisation of both men and women, forced and late-term abortions, and the killing of female babies. China's demographers are growing concerned about the impact of the policy on the country's future ability to support its ageing population.
Madam Zhang Yuqing, vice-minister in charge of family planning, said recently that improved living standards meant the birth rate was declining and that the scheme was "a policy for one generation". The state is placing more reliance on voluntary birth control, and among the urban elite the birth rate has now fallen as low as in some European countries.
By 2003, said Ms Zhang, most young city people of marriageable age will be only children. But when two only children marry, they are allowed to have more than one child, one of many exemptions from the one-child policy. Others include couples where the first child is disabled, where one had a child by a previous marriage or where the husband works in a dangerous job.
Rural families, who make up 70 per cent of the population, and most ethnic minorities have all along been allowed to have more than one child. Ms Zhang said there were more than six million abortions last year, but the real figure is thought to be considerably higher.
So, too, is the population figure. One authority in Beijing acknowledged yesterday that parents in some rural areas, where large families are traditional and where great reliance is placed on children supporting them in old age, simply do not register the birth of a child if it would mean penalties from officials.
Conor O'Clery may be contacted by email at: conoroclery@ireland.com