A General Overview of The One-Child Policy in China

A General Overview of the One-Child Policy in China Stream, 8th December 2003

A General Overview of The One-Child Policy in China

One of the main problems facing China in the recent fifty years is overpopulation, which strongly affects, and is affected by, the Chinese way of life. Therefore, quite obviously, to ascertain the way of contemporary Chinese living, studying the most important population policy in Mainland China, which is known today as the One-Child policy, is a good start. Around the implementing background, the content of this policy, and its influence on Chinese society, this essay will try to give a general overview of the well-known One-Child Policy.

Traditional China and Population Growth

China’s population growth has long been a problem. Part of the reason for this is that Confucian values emphasize that family is the center of a moral and political universe. Having many sons not only fulfilled one’s obligation to one’s ancestors by continuing the family line, but also created security in one’s old age in that sons were mandated, by both cultural expectation and laws, to care for their parents. Sons also became a status symbol, for which a family that was doing well enough economically would support many sons, and possibly many wives. But to daughters, because they would leave their families when they got married and only return on special events such as New Year or for a funeral, they were seen to be a waste of emotional and financial investment. As such, daughters were called “spilled water” meaning that having them was a waste.

China’s population growth has increased exponentially in the last few of centuries, rising from around 65 million in the early 1400s to 150 million in 1600, to 583 million in 1953, (Ho, Ping-ti 1959: 277-278) and the huge currently stands at approximately 1.3 billion. Perhaps the two biggest factors here are Mao Zedong’s emphasis on large families and then, later, the one-child policy to rectify Mao’s policies. Mao Zedong was the leader of the communist revolution and the country until his death. In part because he grew up on a farm where many children were necessary as laborers, and in part because he had an ideological commitment to a Leninist state in which he believed that the strength of the nation would rely on having as many workers and soldiers as possible, he strongly urged the nation to bear as many children as possible. Families with the most children were given awards and publicly honored for building a stronger state. Those who had fewer children were castigated as lacking political loyalty. The results were disastrous in that China’s population, already overburdened, grew so quickly that it soon became the most populous nation on Earth. Although China has a relatively large geographical area, with its deserts, mountains, and very long tradition of farming which has made the land less fertile and prone to severe flooding and famine, it floundered a lot under the pressure to feed so many people and even suffered a national wide mass starvation at the beginning of the 1960s. Therefore, after years of encouraging reproduction, in 1971 in order to control such a rapid population growth, the government began promoting a policy encouraging people to have two children per family. But it did not register much effectiveness.

A Brief Introduction of the One-Child Policy

In 1979, noticing that the population was still dramatically increasing in spite of its efforts, the government implemented a highly controversial policy—the One-Child Policy in an attempt to reduce the unbearably large population to combat the widespread poverty and improve the overall quality of life as well.

This is a preview of the whole essay

A Brief Introduction of the One-Child Policy

Mainly, this policy consists of three points: advocating delayed marriage and delayed child bearing; advocating fewer and healthier births; and advocating one child per couple. So basically, a married couple could only have one child. But according to the law, there are some exceptions to this rule. Parents are allowed to have a second child if several criteria are met, such as if the first child dies or a couple divorces and a new spouse has no children, etc.

The governments also enforce this regulation by legal sanctions—penalizing families that have more children. Parents with an over quota of children are fined for each additional birth, their taxes are raised, and they no longer receive free health care. On the other hand parents who comply with the One-Child policy receive money from the government in addition to their free health care. (Croll, Davin, and Kane 1985: 48-50)

However, all these legal regulations with sanctions do not mean that an over quota of births does not exist. The policy is very difficult to enforce, especially in rural areas, where enforcement officials are more prone to corruption, boys are more highly valued over girls and families usually need to be large to support their farm work. As a result, many rural families have more than one child and either opt to pay the fines or simply do not report the other children. Also in some places, many rural couples get around the law by sending the pregnant woman to stay with relatives until the baby is born or claiming the newborn baby was adopted or belongs to a friend or relative. But backed by the punitive sanctions, the One-Child policy has generally worked in cites.

The Results and the Significant Influences

From1979 until now, the One-Child policy has been strictly advocated in China for more than 20 years. It has dramatically reduced China’s population by at least 250 million since 1980. () The current rate of births is down to 1.8 children per woman, from the 8 to 12 in the 1950s-1960s. This really does relieve some of the obvious stress on China, which already has one fifth of the world’s population. So, definitely, it did successfully achieve its primary purpose.

However, it also has brought so many positive and negative influences, which probably are beyond the expectation of the government that established it twenty years ago. This will be explained from two aspects below.

I. What happens when the families comply with the One-Child Policy?

Most couples comply with the One-Child policy according to the law. A lighter family burden certainly means higher living standards. Also, education is very expensive in China. Especially in the countryside, the school fees has risen rapidly—representing around 27% of the total budget of an average family with just one child. () Therefore, the one-child policy allows families to concentrate their resources on one child, thus leading to higher standards of education.

Furthermore, it can be argued that it is the One-Child policy that has promoted women’s liberation in China. This point of view can be seen from two aspects—both the mother and the daughter. Because of the reduction in the number of children from even as much as eight to only one, women, especially urban women, are now able to concentrate on their careers instead of raising lots of children. This has led to increased roles for women in the workforce. Also, in the system of patrilineal kinship that has long characterized most of Chinese societies, parents had little incentive to invest in their daughters’ education or careers. Daughters who are born only children, however, enjoy unprecedented parental support because they do not have to compete with brothers for parental investment.

Then, most importantly, the One-Child policy created a certain social group called “Only Children”, which will gradually become a huge element of Chinese Society. Adults in Chinese society worry that having so many only children will cause a new generation of spoiled and selfish children that are so-called “little emperors”, since their parents and grandparents have fewer people to spread their largesse. (Milwertz 1997: 122) Studies have shown that these children are less interested in tradition than their elders and feel compelled to quickly carve out a niche for themselves in society. Chinese parents as well as the Chinese government feared the 4-2-1 syndrome, the idea of having four grandparents and two parents all focusing their attention on one child. So, children usually attend nursery and day-care programmes from a very early age. These programmes enforce working together and do not individually spoil the children. What’s more, the Chinese government also has started parenting classes and family clinics to deal with this kind of issues.

II What happens when the families do not comply with the One-Child Policy?

Undoubtedly, many couples do not comply with the policy and want to have extra children. With the One-Child Policy, social pressure will be placed on a woman to have an abortion if she decides to be pregnant after she has already has a child. This often includes very late term abortions. Reports of mass sterilizations in rural areas are well documented. Many people argue that in a western viewpoint, the Chinese government is acting unfairly by limiting individual freedom, violating human rights and invading people’s privacy. But, essentially, Chinese culture always believes in the Confucian tie between family and state, which means that the individual serves the collective rather than the other way around. So, given this very different view of the government’s rightful domain, the one-child policy is an extension of a larger socio-political worldview.

Apart from that, because Chinese families overwhelmingly prefer male children to female children, female infanticide is increasing. As a result, the number of men is thought to outnumber women in China by more than 60 million. () That seems to be a long-term effect that these “extra” males cannot find females to marry. Therefore, some critics blame that the Chinese government lacked consideration and just took a short-term view.

Without choosing to kill the child, sometimes, families that cannot afford the fines feel social and financial pressure to abandon the child and even though abandonment is a punitive crime, most are overlooked and go unpunished. Thus, many Chinese children end up in orphanages or are adopted within China or by families overseas.

Moreover, there are also many rural families who have more than one child and simply do not report the other children. This often plays itself out along gender lines, too. In such cases parents will almost always register a male child rather than a female child. Female children who are not registered cannot go to school, get proper medical attention, get jobs outside of their villages, or any other government assistance. That should be a larger negative influence of the One-Child policy rather than anyone else.

From discussing the background, the implement, as well as the effects of the China’s One-Child policy, it can be argued that this controversial policy has caused a lot of social problems, but also has solved lots of social problems meanwhile. On 2nd September 2002, China’s Population and Family Planning Law first put into implement, which officially suggested that China would neither tighten nor relax its family planning policy of “One Couple, One Child” for a long period of time. That China insists on carrying it on has already shown that Chinese politicians are indeed trying to enforce this law for public welfare. End with the words of a professor Vanessa L. Fong, ‘Global processes of industrialization, modernization, and urbanization could have caused a fertility transition in Chinese cities even without a one-child policy. But such a transition would probably have occurred more slowly than the transition mandated by the One-Child policy.’

()

(1878 Words)

Appendix:

According to the One-Child Policy of China, the couple will be allowed to a second child if one of the below criteria is met:

The first child dies;
The first child is severely handicapped and he or she will not be able to help take care of his or her parents in old age;
They have twins or triplets (resulting in all kinds of Chinese and “Western” medicines are sold to try to increase the odds of this);
A couple divorces and a new spouse has no children;
Parents in rural areas are allowed to have two children provided the first is a girl;
Both parents are only children, they are allowed to have more than one child provided the children are spaced more than four years apart;
Ethnic minorities are allowed to have two children on the grounds that there are so few of them that reducing their numbers would mean their eventual disappearance. (Ironically, this is likely to lead to their disappearance in a different way – Han Chinese, which is the main ethnic group in China, are so anxious to have more than one child that marrying an ethnic minority is beginning to be seen as an easy way to get around the one-child policy. As a result, intermarriage is likely to assimilate the minorities into the larger population.)

()

Bibliography:

Croll, Elisabeth; Davin, Delia; and Kane, Penny. 1985. China’s One-Child Family Policy. The Macmillan Press Ltd.
Ho, Ping-ti. 1959. Studies of the Population of Chin, 1368-1953. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press
Milwertz, Cecilia Nathansen. 1997. Accepting Population Control: Urban Chinese Women and the One-Child Family Policy. Curzon Press
: 14th November 2003
: 14th November 2003
: 15th November 2003