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Many of us grew up being told ours is a country of abundance.

That is true only when we put aside our huge population. Otherwise, it is a deceptive illusion that blinds us to quite the opposite picture when gauged in per capita terms.

For many of our otherwise proud achievements, the 1.3 billion mouths have proved a frustrating denominator.

We are quickly becoming one of the world's foremost foreign trade bodies, largest economies, and so on. But our status as a developing nation has hardly changed.

We all know why. We have too many mouths to feed.

Were it not for the family planning policy, which has been in place for more than three decades, our country would have 400 million more citizens than it does today.

Given our current pattern of resource and energy use, we cannot afford to imagine how the nation would sustain itself in that case.

The Communist Party of China and the State Council's promise to sustain the family planning program is a timely response to recent proposals to loosen the grip on population scale.

With all the population control mechanisms in place, the nation will still see a net annual addition of 8 to 10 million people in the next dozen years.

And the country's population headaches are far more complicated than just quantity.

Experts have warned about the triple peaks of total population, working-age population and aged population in the first half of the century. Their confluence would be an unbearable weight on our shoulders.

Except for continuous accent on population control, the outcome of such endeavors will hinge on how well we do in social security.

From a shortage of wage earners to a lack of security in old age, almost every outstanding population problem is related to our primitive social security network.

We have heard enough vows from the authorities. But after all the thunder, we need to see the raindrops.

The authorities must come to terms with the Chinese reality that many people choose to have more children out of an unspoken distrust of the official rhetoric about guarantees.

Nothing could deliver more sense of guarantee than an inclusive social security network.

Our State coffer caretakers are scratching their heads over where to put the country's increasingly redundant foreign exchange reserves. They can think about social security.

(China Daily January 24, 2007)