China will continue to adhere to the family planning policy in the long run, the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee said at a conference in Beijing Thursday.

The conference, presided by General Secretary of the CPC Central Committee Hu Jintao, described family planning as a key factor in economic and social development.

The meeting urged continued research on population development strategies, improvement of population quality based on a low birthrate, better technological and service levels in family planning and reining in a rising gender imbalance.

The focus of population and family planning efforts must shift from purely controlling the numbers to stabilizing the low birthrate, it said.

China would now have had 400 million more people if the policy decreeing most couples to have only one child had not been put in place, official statistics show.

The country's population officially reached 1.3 billion in January last year.

Formulated in the early 1970s, the family planning policy encourages late marriages and childbearing.

(China Daily, Xinhua News Agency December 1, 2006)