China is considering an end to the limit imposed on the number of children that each family can have, according to Bloomberg.
Such a move would be a dramatic shift away from the one-child policy that China imposed on its citizens for decades.
In early 2016, Beijing relaxed restrictions on its one-child policy by allowing couples to have two children.
A formal announcement by China's government could be made by the end of this year.
China's birthrate has been declining rapidly since the 1980s and has become a pressing concern for President Xi JinPing as he looks to develop the economy.
The easing of the one-child policy, which was amended in early 2016 to allow all Chinese families to have two children, helped push the number of births in the country to 17.86 million in 2016, an increase of 7.9 percent over 2015, according to state media reports citing China's National Health and Family Planning Commission. The figure was the highest since 2000.
Other data released by China's National Bureau of Statistics recorded a slightly higher figure of 18.46 million births in 2016.
Read the full report at Bloomberg here.
- NBC News contributed to this report.