China’s current Communist Party announced at the end of October that they would be getting rid of their one child policy. It was introduced in 1979 in an attempt to stifle the rapidly growing population, to reduce the demand for water and other natural resources. Couples of the ethnic Han group were limited to one child, while minority groups were allowed two. The policy was later amended to allow rural couples a second child if their first-born was female.
At the time, the population was just under one billion, and has now reached 1.4 billion earlier than projected; it is still increasing, although the government estimates that the policy has prevented 400 million births.
The traditional preference for boys over girls has led couples to give up their daughters for adoption, abandon or kill the newborn, or have sex-selective abortions, which unfortunately can be difficult to monitor. China now has between 32 and 36 million more men than it should have naturally, and this gender imbalance has led to sex trafficking, kidnapping, and other crimes as young men are unable to find wives.
The government used a number of preventative and punitive measures to enforce the policy. They hired over a million workers to encourage sterilization, abortions and birth control use. Women were often denied anaesthetic while giving birth, to reduce the desire to have another child. Offending urban couples were fined an amount proportional to their income, and their salaries were reduced by 15% until the child reached seven years old. Rural families had their livelihood or other property confiscated.
All couples are now allowed to have two children to “improve the balanced development of population”, and to deal with the aging population. People are living longer but having fewer children, which will result in a huge loss to the workforce in the next twenty years as 67 million will retire – doubling the number of seniors – without enough young people to fill their shoes.
The population problem will not be easy to fix. Fertility rates are believed to be lowering, and more importantly, so are the number of women willing to have children. A study from the Central University of Finance and Economics in Beijing says that the number of couples who wanted a second child decreased from 59% to 15% between 1980 and 2011.
In 2013, the government amended the policy to allow a second child if one of the parents was also an only child, but it yielded only 470,000 additional newborns in 2014 rather than the two million expected.
It is unlikely that the new rule will cause a “baby boom”; on the contrary, “a future population decline is inevitable” says Liang Jianzhang, a professor at Peking University’s Guanghua School of Management. Population control was a popular debate topic in 2000, but interest seems to have decreased significantly since then; the health commission official comments that, “In retrospect, it might have been better to drop the one-child policy back then”. It is hard to predict the amount of work which will have to go into reversing the damage this policy of over three decades has caused; only time will tell.
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