China's One Child Policy

by maitri_12 (student)

China’s One Child Policy

China, a beautiful country in the Far East, host of gorgeous mountainsides and plains, plagued with the problem of overpopulation. In and around the 1980s the population reached one billion. More than one out of ten people in the world back then were Chinese. With a current estimated 1.4billion people living in China, something needed to be done in order to lower the birth rates and control the fast growing population. The solution the Chinese government came up with was the one child policy. They set up a number penalties and benefits in order to encourage the Chinese people to cooperate with this policy. The predicted outcome was to reduce the birth rates and reduce their population, which was ultimately affecting the Chinese economy.

The one child policy is a limitation on most families which is considered in the Chinese government the family planning policy. It restricts the number of children married urban couples can have to only one child. In some cases, rich Chinese families pay a certain fee to the government if they want to have a second child.

China's one child policy was established by Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping in 1979 to limit communist China's population growth. The reason to why China came into the population crisis was that people in China chose to have such large families because of the high mortality rates of their kids; they would not even live past the age of five. Families perceived that out of those ten kids only half of them would live, and so to have as many as they could to ensure that at least some of their kids would survive. As time passed people still held these beliefs, however medical innovations and better health care helped extend the lives of those kids, consequently those families that decided to have many kids in order to ensure the lives of a few kids were now realizing that all their kids were living and they were left raising all six to ten kids. This is how the population in China became an excess and ultimately started to affect the country.

Exceptions to the rule also exist in rural parts of china for the following categories of family:

When both parents are only children, they are allowed to have two children;
If one of the parents is disabled;
If the first child is born severely disabled;
If the first child dies;
First child is a girl;
When “practical difficulties” exist that make having more than one child necessary, as when there is a lot of farm work that must be accomplished and the family needs extra workers;

This prevented too dramatic of a population decrease. However, if you are in the larger cities and are a Han, the one child policy is still ...

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When both parents are only children, they are allowed to have two children;
If one of the parents is disabled;
If the first child is born severely disabled;
If the first child dies;
First child is a girl;
When “practical difficulties” exist that make having more than one child necessary, as when there is a lot of farm work that must be accomplished and the family needs extra workers;

This prevented too dramatic of a population decrease. However, if you are in the larger cities and are a Han, the one child policy is still generally pretty strict.
The exceptions and work around generally mean though, that the birth rate is China is closer to 1.8 children per family than just one-child, as the name of the policy might indicate.

The one child policy is a bad policy because it creates a large number of poor elderly people, who would be better off financially if they had more children to assist with their financial support. This has caused negative consequences in increased abortions, unwanted kids put up for adoption, female infanticide and caused gender imbalance. However, recently the policy was over looked by the Chinese government and showed considerations on allowing families to have a second child.

After the introduction of the one-child policy, the fertility rate in China fell from over three births per woman in 1980 to approximately 1.54 in 2011. The Chinese government estimated that it had three to four hundred million fewer people in 2008 with the one-child policy, than it would have had otherwise. Chinese authorities thus consider the policy as a great success in helping to implement China's current economic growth. The reduction in the fertility rate and the population growth has reduced the severity of problems that come with overpopulation, like, slums, overwhelmed social services (such as health, education, law enforcement), and strain on the ecosystem from abuse of fertile land and production of high volumes of waste. Even with the one-child policy in place, China still has one million more births than deaths every five weeks.

My reaction to the one child policy is that they shouldn’t make it so strict at first. Couples should get to choose whether or not they want the baby and they shouldn’t get forced abortions. The government should also allow couples to have more female babies because there is an uneven amount of males to females. I don’t blame the people who are willing to lie so they could keep the baby because it’s their baby and they should keep it if they could raise it.

By Maitri Patel

China's One Child Policy

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