As far away as Wisconsin, the tentacles of China’s one-child policy wrap around the people who grew up with it, making Dr. Fuxian Yi something of an oddball among his Chinese friends there. He has three children.

‘‘In our community a lot of friends say, ‘Why do you have three children? It’s really brave of you. It’s so expensive.’ Mostly, they have one, or two,’’ said Dr. Yi, a scientist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, who moved to the United States in 1999, in a telephone interview.

Since the announcement last week that China is planning to raise the number of children permitted to all couples to two, many Chinese parents of one child have said they are reluctant to have another, mostly citing high costs.

(The new policy will not take effect until the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress amends the law, the National Health and Family Planning Commission said, without giving a timetable.)

Yet something other than family finances is at work, researchers say. After four decades of state propaganda ordering citizens to curb their child-bearing and to focus on making rapid economic progress, people judge their own and their families’ achievements largely in economic, not emotional, terms. Chinese society has changed.

‘‘China has succeeded in creating a single-child culture,’’ said Lionel Jensen, a professor of East Asian languages and cultures at the University of Notre Dame.

‘‘Since the mid-1980s and then again more emphatically after 1992, the highest organs of government,’’ as well as the late leader Deng Xiaoping, ‘‘have urged the population to seek merit for self and nation in making money,’’ Mr. Jensen said in an email.

‘‘ ‘To get rich is glorious,’ and ‘Jump into the Sea of Commerce,’ such slogans have convinced many individuals and families that making money is a key sign of success and a means of self-preservation and enrichment,’’ he said.

Having one child ‘‘is patriotic, definitively Chinese, and economically rational,’’ Mr. Jensen said.

As a result, the number of people who applied to have a second child once it was permitted in 2013 to couples where one partner was a single child was low.

China’s ‘‘few children, many elderly’’ conundrum, which is affecting the economy by reducing the working-age population and increasing elderly care costs, leads Dr. Yi to make a bold prediction. In about two years, he says, the state will be forced to abandon family planning altogether.

‘‘The 2013 change did not achieve what the government hoped it would achieve,’’ said Dr. Yi, who trained as a physician. ‘‘They wanted an additional two million babies. Over five years they hoped for 10 million.’’

But in 2014 just ‘‘tens of thousands’’ of additional children were born, and in 2015 about 300,000, said Dr. Yi, the author of a Chinese-language book, ‘‘Big Country With an Empty Nest,’’ which is highly critical of the government’s family-planning policies.

The book, which was first published in 2007 in Hong Kong but banned on the Chinese mainland until 2013, is due to be reissued soon in an updated version by the Chinese State Council’s China Development Press.

Even Chinese living in the United States often are not having more than one child, Dr. Yi said. Fear of displeasing their parents back home is another reason.

‘‘Some of them, if they got pregnant with a second child, their parents would say, ‘Why would you have another?’ They’d tell them to have an abortion,’’ Dr. Yi said.

‘‘I have friends who conceived a second child’’ in the United States ‘‘and didn’t dare tell their parents,’’ he said.

Might all that change, given time?

‘‘The very understanding of the family has changed,’’ said Mr. Jensen, adding that economics were likely to be a powerful factor in decision-making for a while to come.

‘‘The government has a long way to go if it wants to change its demographic patterns,’’ Dr. Yi said.

‘‘It’s my hope, and also my prediction, that in about two years the government is going to lift population control policies completely,’’ he said. ‘‘It will be a big embarrassment for them, and a loss of face. But they have been too forceful all along. This is, after all, a personal and family issue!’’