Not quick enough It seems, birth rate started to decrease long before they have the economy to support incentives like they can now, so it could be that before they wanted to focus on allocating resources into improving their economy, than to spend those resources into marginal increases in birth rate, as we can see with other countries spending heavily in welfare to attempt keeping their birth rate stable or higher. I've posted what I think about the problem in the demographic thread, its not a problem solvable by incentives alone, they need to tackle this from multiple factors like societal, cultural and economical pressures to effectively increase birthrate, and those require a lot of planning and a long time to execute, to see the results.
Once a strategy or major policy is in place, particularly for a long time, it'll become very difficult to change due to institutional inertia, built-in mindset, vested interest and, indeed, averse to risk (asymmetric though). China's demographic changes had been developing and building up for some years now and the data painted a rather clear picture. Many people and experts had warned about the dangerous trend for years. In fact, one can also learn what's ahead from the experiences of other countries, particularly East Asian countries. Still, the leadership had waited too long to act, and when they did act, they moved cautiously. Alas, the trend had become so clear and the data unmistaken, then they accelerated and almost changed the policy every year. The problem is, once you missed the tide, it's very difficult to make up and recover the loss. In this case, the size of childbearing population is dwindling.
Now, in case, some members here become too defensive and claim China has very large population and can afford negative population growth, we're talking about demographic composition and worsening trend not absolute size of population.
Feel free to apply this to other major, burning policies of the day.
