After more than 30 years of imposing a one-child policy, China is facing a dilemma of rapid aging and serious gender imbalances. Now one of the nation’s birth-control officials is suggesting going the opposite way and forcing couples to have a second child.

Despite the relaxation of one-child policy last year, the expected baby boom failed to appear. Under the new policy, couples may have a second child if either was an only child, but only 9% of eligible families had applied to do so as of the end of 2014, according to statistics from the national birth-control authority.

While forcing people to have children could prove more difficult than forbidding them to do so, this is exactly what Mei Zhiqiang, deputy head of the birth-control bureau in Shanxi province and a Standing Committee member of the province’s political advisory body, has suggested.

“For the prosperity of our nation and the happiness of us and our children, we should make a serious effort to adjust the demographic structure and make our next generation have two children through policy and system design,” Mei said, according to various media reports.

The decades-old one-child policy has skewed China’s population older, as well as resulted in far more boys than girls, due to some couples seeking to make sure their only child would be male. The aging problem is weighing on China’s pension system, while the gender imbalance has made it hard for some men to find wives.

As a result, Mei said in his proposal to the provincial political advisory body earlier this year, the mere relaxation of the one-child policy isn’t enough, and two-child policy should be enforced.

The remarks have triggered public uproar in China, with the Shanghai-based Guangming Daily website publishing a commentary on Friday, referring to the idea as reflecting “a horrible mindset” and inspiring feelings of “ferocious [government] control.”

Separately, a report on the news portal of Sohu.com SOHU, -0.29%  , noted that Romania tried just such a policy during the 1960s, in which the Communist leadership banned all abortion and birth control and forced women to bear a certain number of children.

The result of the Romanian program was “a disaster,” the report said, prompting a spike in infant mortality, the deaths of many women in underground abortion clinics, and the shooting deaths of others who tried to escape from the country rather than bear children at the behest of the state. (www.marketwatch.com)