In addition, many countries have had substantial declines in fertility during the past 25 years, and China's neighbors in East Asia have some of the lowest total fertility rates in the world: 1.04 in Singapore, 1.38 in Japan, and 0.91 in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region.17 Even allowing for the fact that these countries are more developed and urbanized than China, the parallels are hard to ignore. It is reasonable to speculate that there would have been a further decline in China's total fertility rate had the voluntary policy of the 1970s continued.