BY CONGRESSMAN CHRIS SMITH - Media outlets across the nation last week ran with the headline: “China Abolishes One-Child Policy.” Yet these headlines are highly misleading. It is true that China will revise its birth limitations policy, but this revision is not some major change to be lauded. The one-child policy has simply become a two-child policy, while the coercive population control apparatus remains essentially unchanged. The Chinese government has retained its power to tell Chinese couples how many children they may have and retained the power to punish couples who disobey.

The new two-child policy may allow for more births, but it does not remove the incentives given to local officials to pressure, coerce or even force mothers to abort a child if it is the couple’s third child. Nor does this policy erase the damage that three decades of coercive birth control polices have already inflicted on Chinese families. There will be no justice for victims of forced abortions or sterilizations; the horrific crimes committed by China’s population control police will likely be swept under table. We shouldn’t be applauding China’s policy, we should be insisting they abolish all birth limits.

What Americans have referred to as the one-child policy has long been a misnomer. In Chinese, they call the policy “population and birth planning” and it stemmed from the belief that the Chinese Communist Party should control production of Chinese families like the production of its factories. The consequences of treating families like cogs in an economic machine have been devastating for China’s women and girls. Over the past three decades of China’s coercive birth control policy, it was common for pregnant women to be hunted down like dogs and forced to abort their “surplus” children. Local officials used massive fines to line their own pockets as couples hid their second and third children. Many of these “extra” children were unable to obtain the documentation needed to attend school, receive health care or get jobs. They became stateless children within China.

Moreover, in a country without Social Security, traditional customs dictate that couples depend on sons to care for them in their old age. This son preference has led to a severe and prolonged sex-ratio imbalance in China. Chinese couples had to make the unimaginable choice to abort or abandon their unborn child if it was a girl. China’s National Bureau of Statistics estimated in 2014 that China already has 34 million more men than women. This “surplus” of men is the cause of serious human trafficking problems, as foreign women from Southeast Asia and North Korea are trafficked into China for forced marriage or commercial sexual exploitation.

It should come as no surprise that this policy was hated by the Chinese people. In part due to push back from the people, the government has long allowed rural couples to have a second child if their first child was female. For a number of years, some localities have allowed couples in which both parents are only children to have two children. In 2013, China’s government further revised its birth control policy to allow two children per couple if one parent is an only child.

These policy revisions have been piecemeal and unevenly applied across China’s provinces, but highlight two key facts: First, the new announcement was not a dramatic change but just another policy adjustment, similar to previous adjustments; and second, given the minimal impact of the 2013 policy adjustment, there is little reason to expect the universal two-child policy to fundamentally change the dynamics on the ground in China. Chinese couples are still not free to decide the size of their own families. The human rights abuses associated with China’s coercive birth control policy will continue. China’s pernicious sex-ratio imbalance will likely persist for the foreseeable future.

• Christopher H. Smith, New Jersey Republican, is chairman of the U.S. Congressional-Executive Commission on China and chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Global Human Rights and International Organizations.