On Thursday, the Chinese Communist Party's 18th Party Congress revealed in its Fifth Plenum Communique that China will abandon the One Child Policy, allowing all couples to have two children. This follows a tentative loosening of restrictions in 2013 that allowed couples of only children to have two children. The One Child Policy was adopted in 1979 in an effort to avoid massive overpopulation. However, as so often happens with reform efforts in China, unforeseen consequences of the policy gradually snowballed, leading to a huge gender imbalance contributing to social tension and an inverted population pyramid where a diminishing pool of young workers is supporting an ever-larger number of retirees. This has prompted fears in China that the country will grow old before it becomes rich. China's political leaders hope to reverse these distortions, but the fifth plenum decision will have few short-term effects.