Ah, communist China — where forced abortions, extralegal detention and torture, religious persecution, rampant censorship, and other such egregious human-rights abuses are just the non-newsworthy stuff of the normal and everyday.

There’s been some speculation in recent months that the Chinese regime has been considering doing away with their infamous one-child policy (the violation of which results in major fines in modernized, more upscale areas but sometimes much worse in poorer, more remote areas), but it looks like the government is ultimately balking at the possibility of so much administrative upheaval and just isn’t quite ready to abandon the nefarious policy.

China has quelled speculation its controversial “one-child” policy is to be scrapped, instead announcing Wednesday that family planning laws to curb the birth rate will remain.

“The policy should be a long-term one and its primary goal is to keep a low birthrate,” Wang Xia, minister in charge of the National Population and Family Planning Commission, said. …

“I’m surprised,” said Professor Shaun Breslin, associate fellow at U.K. think tank, Chatham House. “Almost everything we had heard in recent months pointed towards a relaxation of one-child.”

The 1979 law prohibits about one-third of China’s 1.3 billion citizens from having a second child. The policy is officially backed up by fines, but campaigners say more than one million forced abortions are carried out every year. …

Which in turn means that the many sex-selective abortions leading to a wild gender disparity and the obvious demographic problems of a tiny younger generation supporting a relatively huge aging one, are going to go unsolved. Not to mention, a recent study found that the one-child policy is having a net negative effect on China’s population — in a nutshell, these generations of financially overburdened only children may have some serious psychological damage:

The Chinese policy that limits most families to having one child has had psychological fallout for the children born after it was instituted in 1979, economists report in the journal Science. …

The researchers concluded that the “one-child-policy” players were less trusting, less trustworthy, less competitive and more risk-averse than the older ones.

And on the basis of a personality test, they were also “less conscientious, more neurotic and more pessimistic,” said an author of the study, Lisa Cameron, an economist at Monash University in Australia.