Chinese population officials announced that the one-child family planning policy will be kept for another decade, putting an end to any speculations regarding possible changes.

Zhang Weiqing, minister of the State Population and Family Planning Commission, said that any major changes to the family planning policy will affect China on many levels, bringing more problems than benefits.

“The current family planning policy, formed as a result of gradual changes in the past two decades, has proved compatible with national conditions,” Zhang told in an interview published Monday in the China Mail, the country’s official English language newspaper. “So it has to be kept unchanged at this time to ensure stable and balanced population growth.”

Zhang said that 200 million Chinese will enter childbearing age in the next 10 years. “Given such a large population base, there would be major fluctuations in population growth if we abandoned the one-child rule now,” Zhang added.

Canceling the one-child policy can put pressure on the social and economic development of China. China has a population of 1.3 billion people, representing one fifth of the world’s population. Generally, urban families can have one child and rural families are allowed to have two if the first is a girl.

The policy, introduced during the late 1970s, has prevented about 400 million births, the government officials say; the gender balance is in favor of males.

Critics of the policy say that it has caused forced abortions and sterilizations. Discussions on changing the policy have focused on the fact that China’s aging population is growing, while there are fewer young working adults to pay taxes and take care of the seniors.

Zhang said that the problems should not be blamed only on the one-child rule, as it will be a simplistic manner to approach them.

However, the one-child policy is broken by China’s wealthy people or celebrities, who have two children and 10% of them have three, Xinhua news agency reports.