China: The One-Child Policy

China: The One-Child Policy
By Chris Kadlec - Originally Published March 2000
Last Updated 25 February 2008

This page is linked to by: Dansville (New York) High School
(direct link) and Asia Education Foundation via Cirriculum
Corporation Australia (direct link), among others...

This is a report that I did casually in my high school Sociology class that was presented and graded a lot lower than I had hoped. However, the information presented in this paper has been used by countless students of universities and high schools around the world... to my surprise, of course. This page was originally posted for friends to see, but after the huge response - suddenly swamped with over 1000 hits in under a month - from those who say it has been very helpful to them, I have decided to permanently keep it on my website. If you're simply at this page out of curiosity, I hope you go ahead, read, and learn something new. If you're here with hopes of research, please be sure to state all sources and I hope you find all information needed! However, please keep in mind that some of this information is now outdated - politics and policies do change you know! Also, thank you to Australia's Cirriculum Corporation for including my website in their Student Activities section for "Website Investigation and Design: China's One Child Policy" for the past few years.

DECEMBER 2004 UPDATE
The Economist pp. 51-52, 18 December 2004

Download the article (17 kb)

China, the world's most populous nation, holds approximately twenty percent of our planet's people. Anyone in their right mind would surely believe that a country that had expanded by 900 million people in the last century, two-thirds of that amount in the last fifty years, is simply growing too fast. No one, until Deng Xiaoping in 1979, knew how to limit this stunning growth of population.

It was 1979 when Xiaoping first introduced the One-Child Policy to his nation. China's population had more than tripled since 1900 and the government was feeling constant pressure to bring down the numbers. However, there were problems with the idea of a One-Child Policy and China's government knew well of these problems.

According to Chinese tradition, there must be a male child in order for the family to continue. Sometimes a family has four girls before a boy is finally given birth to. This was soon to change under Xiaoping's new policy that was enforced nationwide beginning in 1981.

Originally, the One-Child Policy called for enforcing laws allowing each couple within China just one child that is, boy or girl a policy to be strictly enforced by a government already looked down upon for its human rights violations.

China is an incredibly large country, one of the world's largest. Therefore, the strict enforcing of this new policy was practically impossible. There are many small villages in rural areas that cannot be inspected by officials searching for couples who have broken the policy rules. There are, however, both government officials and State Family Planning Commission officials who highly monitor couples within China's fast-growing cities. This is where the majority of the nation's people reside and where the population growth issue is most critical.

In China, all couples, in cities and in rural areas, know the penalties when risking having a second or third child. The major problem among Chinese couples is the tradition in which all families must have a boy to carry on the family. Because of this, Chinese women will soon face added pressures in the coming future:

* Because of the Chinese tradition involving giving birth to at least one male child, female infants are often killed, aborted, or left to die so the family may have a boy that is, because in most cases, the One-Child Policy allows only one child. Because the family must have a boy, and only one child is allowed, the one child is almost always a male, thus creating a surplus of males in China.

* With a surplus of males come horrendous problems. In the last few decades, China has transferred much of its economy from strenuous industrial jobs to light industry. Without as much strenuous work being done, fewer males are now needed, therefore the unemployment rate among males has recently risen. More females than ever are needed in the job market for the newer light industry jobs. But, where are they? So many families have given up their only girl(s) to have a boy. Not only is the male population in China suffering unemployment, but the economy is also feeling the effects of the One-Child Policy. Employers have no women to hire.

* Many female infants, in order to gain a male child to continue the family, have been put up for adoption. The adoption rate isn't exactly much higher than it was in the 1980's, but the infants, the majority being young girls, are pouring into Chinese adoption agencies at higher rates. Adoptions rose sharply in the 1980s. Before the One-Child Policy, there were fewer than 200,000 cases per year. There were over 500,000 in 1987; 400,000 per year between 1984 and 1986.

* Now that many of China's babies affected by the One-Child Policy have reached reproductive and marrying age, there has been more notice given to the fact that there are not enough women for men to marry. Therefore, families cannot be continued as the Chinese tradition strives for. The policy is ruining Chinese families.

So what are the penalties for Chinese families who cannot effectively sneak by the State Family Planning Commission? Most Western nations are not fully aware of the penalties. However, there have been many stories told about what happens to a Chinese women and/or couple when the rules have been broken.

In most cases in which a couple has broken the law, the female is sterilized and has an intrauterine device (IUD) inserted, checked a few times each year. An IUD is a form of contraceptive, one of the only ones that women in China know about. The government often does not make women aware of any other forms of birth control. Even when a couple has not broken the rules, an IUD is often inserted after the birth of the first child. Many city-dwelling couples are now allowed to have a second child if they simply pay a "family planning fee" to cover the cost of an additional citizen. In other situations, families must pay extra taxes that is, stiff fines for having an extra child. In Shanghai, the fee is three times the combined annual salary of the parents. In Zhejiang, it is 20 percent of the parents' combined salaries for five years. Most families cannot afford these taxes and do not have more than one child. In Qinghai Province, the government has added incentives that it hopes will lead to less need for enforcing the One-Child Policy and more willingness among couples to have only one child. It has been offering smaller families special low-interest business loans.

But many have asked, "Has this policy even been accomplishing anything since it was put in place?" The answer: Yes. However, there are catches to this answer. Without the One-Child Policy, China's population by the end of 1996 would have been approximately 1.9 billion. The policy actually prevented 300 million new citizens from being born in the 1980s and 1990s. But many still question why the policy was ever put in place. China's birth rate had already begun to decline in the 1970s before the policy was even introduced. The birth rate was at a steady 2% between 1949 and 1974, then declined to about 1.5% in the mid 1970s, in which births had declined from 34 per 1000 people to 18 per 1000. After the policy was put in place, the birth rate actually rose to around 21 births per 1000 people, never falling below 2.5 children per family in rural China. However, it did fall slightly to 1.2 per family in China's cities, where the policy has been more strictly enforced. The impact of the policy on the population has been minimal but the impact on the family has taken its toll.

There are many problems with families having only one child:

* Mental health of the population may be affected over time. Parents, as most know, often wish for their child/children to be successful. However, not all children are successful, and against their parents' wishes, not all children can be the best. China, which has high competition amongst its children, may soon see the pressures and competition take a terrible toll on its younger generation.

* Chinese are known to spoil their children. This is not an understatement, but is fact. Chinese are spoiling their children more than ever since most children have become their family's one and only. Since they are the one and only child in their family, they will grow up lacking the ability to co-work with others, despite performing well individually. This also will affect China's already-suffering economy.

* The average age of the population will soon increase since the number of young people is constantly declining. This means that China will have more elderly people to deal with than ever before. Chinese tradition requires that the children take care of their parents when the parents reach an elderly age and are no longer able to take care of themselves. This will add stress on the then-working child who will have to take care of parents alone with no help from a sibling. This, a result of China's One-Child Policy, will most likely cause a disruption in China's style of living in the very near future.

In 1997, Hong Kong, a British colony next to Mainland China, was returned to China, its rightful owner. Luckily, residents of Hong Kong, most of which are Chinese, have not been affected by China's policy to reduce its population. In fact, Hong Kong school students learn about the One-Child Policy that many of their relatives in the mainland have endured over the past twenty years. It is more acceptable in Hong Kong than in Western countries. Why is it more acceptable? Western culture is so much different from Chinese culture. The traditions are different, way of living, standards of living... everything is at the other end of the spectrum. Many in Hong Kong and China believe that Western nations have no actual right to judge China's policies its people live under. No matter how bad they may be, sometimes they are accepted because there are things that must be fixed. This is China a land of people that have grown up with harsh human rights policies a land of people that will die under the rule of harsh human rights policies. Hong Kong university student Beth Yu, 19, had much to say about her nation's One-Child Policy after discussing it in classes:

"This policy is very effective to put down the growing pressure of population on China and it is necessary to have birth control, in spite of the moral thing; it is a quite successful policy. I think it is a kind of deprivation of freedom and right, and in fact, this policy is only successfully taken in cities while, in rural areas, most people will have more children secretly. Actually, some [groups] use this policy to increase their revenues. When they discover someone has had "extra" children, they will ask them for a fine, force them to pay by violence (e.g. destroy their houses, etc.) That's the case in the past after the reform in China. Although I believe that it's better now, this policy still makes many tragedies. In Hong Kong, the traditions of China have not bound us so tight as if we were in China's mainland."

Maybe China's One-Child Policy sounds bad. Some promising improvements are in the works currently, a few having already taken place. For example, many Chinese Family Planning Commission officials have been educated in the United States and other Western nations. As a result, they have begun passing additional birth control knowledge onto their patients in their local provinces. This, notes many Chinese women, has helped out a great deal. In rural areas, the government is still lenient with its enforcing of the policy. It is not as important since the population rise has been brought to a slower pace. Despite these improvements, China plans to keep the One-Child Policy at least a few more years. Sooner or later, the government plans to either revise its policies or dispose of the family planning policy altogether.

Many believe China should wait until it has reached a higher economic level to initiate a natural decline in birth rates as in all other industrialized countries. But... can we afford to wait?

BIBLIOGRAPHY
WORLD WIDE WEB (WWW)
Links accessed 13 March 2000, inspected 18 May 2003, 08 January 2005, 07 June 2006, and 25 February 2008

1 http://www.hhs.se/EIJS/anomaly/COneKid.htm [broken]
2 http://www.forerunner.com/mandate/X0046_Human_Rights_Abuses_.html [still functioning]
3 http://www.carnell.com/population/one_child.html [broken]
4 http://www.oneworld.org/ips2/apr98/06_19_005.html [broken]
5 http://www.africa2000.com/INDX/unfpageone.html [broken]
6 http://www.mosquitonet.com/~prewett/chinadefendsonechildpol.html [still functioning]
7 http://www.abc.net.au/foreign/1998/ep39-7.htm [still functioning]

From: Beth Yu [mailto: s996859@mailserv.cuhk.edu.hk] [address no longer exists]
Sent: Monday, 27 March 2000 11.50
To: Chris Kadlec
Subject: China: One-Child Policy

I have read your report and I think this report is good. There are sufficient information and figures and here's my comment and other points:

* In fact, apart from the reason of continuing the family, the reason for a family must have a baby boy is that traditional Chinese society is a agricultural society where men provided most of the labor work. So, in order to maintain the productivity or even wanna to increase productivity, having more and more baby boys is the only way, since most of the farmers in China had no extra capital or the education level to carry out mechanization to increase their productivity.

* The word 'cadres' mean the government officials who work in local community or villages. The situation of corruption is very serious in the past (just after the reform of China) and they are keen to rise their revenue. So, forcing the peasants to pay for different taxes and fines is common.

* The one-child policy bring another problem of aging population. Among traditional Chinese society , age of marry is always earlier and the family is always big with 3 , 4, 5 or even more generations. People may marry and have children at 20 or so years old. Then now, there is only one kid at the bottom of the family trees. After twenty or more years, the kid is now 20 years old, his parents may be nearly 50 and their grandparents may 70, and their grandparents' parents may be 90 and still alive. Suppose all of them are retired, how can this kid to support these totally 6 people plus his own (plus his wife and his child) economically? That's the problem of the whole China. When each family is only allowed to have one child, in the next 20 years or more, this small proportion of young population have to support a huge non-productive population. That's the real problem.

* Yep, there is the problem of the "only child" being difficult to develop the communication and co-operative skill as you said. Besides, these "only child" also always be adored too much by their parents , their grand parents , even by their grandparents' parents, since they are the only one child in their families. Especially in the city, these "only child" are given everything which are the best by their parents. These children will become too dependent on their parents, they do not know how to deserve things and listen to the others. Since, everyone is listen to them and they can have everything they want. These will influence their character in their latter lives very much and worse, these effects are negative.

These are my comments. In fact , I have to say that I know nothing more than you. You know that the difference between the culture of Hong Kong and that of the Mainland China is quite large indeed, especially the young generation here. We don't know much about our country, apart from the news in the newspaper and on T.V.

In fact, most things I have mentioned about the One-child policy is learned from the lectures (called "The Chinese Society") and other talks in University. Anyway, I am glad that I can give you some comments on this report about China and I hope that the comments I've given will be useful for you.

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