The People’s Republic of China was formed in 1949. At that time, its population was 550 million. People were encouraged to have children as they believed this gave China power, and the population more than doubled to 1.13 billion by 1990. The problem by then was how to feed all these people. China's population is estimated to be 1,330,044,605 as of July 2008 with births occurring every two seconds and deaths occurring every five seconds. By the end of 2010, China's population is expected to reach 1.4 billion. Around 2030, China's population is anticipated to peak and then slowly start dropping.
This decrease by 2030 may be attributed to China’s one-child policy which is the population control policy (or planned birth policy) of the People's Republic of China. The Chinese government introduced the policy in 1979 to alleviate the social and environmental problems of China. The policy is controversial both within and outside China because of the issues it raises; because of the manner in which the policy has been implemented; and because of concerns about negative economic and social consequences. However, there are still many citizens that continue to have more than one child, despite this policy.
In February 2008 Chinese Government official Wu Jianmin said that the one-child policy would be reconsidered during the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference in March 2008, but at that time a representative of China's National Population and Family Planning Commission said that the policy would remain in place for at least another decade.
China's population and family planning minister has said that China will work to limit its mainland population below 1.37 billion by 2010. Zhang Weiqing, minister in charge of the National Population and Family Planning Commission, stressed that China will keep its family planning policy in place to maintain a low birth level. But demographically speaking, China will face another upsurge of population growth in the coming five years since China's first single-child generation is about to enter reproductive age then, which will make it all the more difficult to maintain a low birth level in the coming years.
Statistics from the commission show that China's population has been brought under control in the past 5 years, with birth rate and natural growth rate dropped from 14.03 per thousand to 12.29 per thousand and 7.58 per thousand to 5.87 per thousand respectively. According to data released by commission, given that if China had failed to implement the family planning policy, China's population would be nearly 400 million more than the present figure.
Government figures show 119 boys are born for every 100 girls in the world's most populous nation. About 40 million men may live as frustrated bachelors by 2020. One of the reasons why males are larger in number than females is because many couples kill their newborn girls in hopes that their next baby will be a boy. This is a most unfortunate result of the one-child policy implemented by China.
The penalties for having more than one child are severe. There are fines for people who violate the policy and officials have been seizing or destroying the property of people who cannot pay the fines.
Chinese officials have issued fines from 500 yuan, or about $65, to 70,000 yuan, or about $9,000, on families who violated the policy at any time since 1980. Many benefits were refused to families with more than one child. Women pregnant for 2nd or subsequent times were often coerced into having abortions. Granny police were recruited in settlements to spy on people in their communities who might be trying to keep a pregnancy secret. Contraception and family planning devices were pushed on people. The policy had to be modified in rural areas, because of traditional preference for sons.
The one-child policy may be failing. The likely explanation is that there are limits to how far government policies can push demographic changes. Policies emphasizing later marriage and fewer children in the 1970s clearly played a part in lowering total fertility rates. Contraceptive usage in China by the early 1980s, for example, was extraordinarily high for Asia at 71 percent of women of reproductive age.
The one-child policy, however, was strongly resisted by people, especially couples living in rural regions. Enforcing the one-child policy in the face of such heavy resistance would have required more forceful measures than the Chinese government was willing to use. This is the source of criticism of China from population advocates who argued China needs to more strictly enforce the one-child policy.
Finally, the one-child policy and the successful resistance to it should give pause to claims made in Western nations that there are up to 500,000 “missing” girls in China. The usual claim is that the “missing” girl phenomenon is caused by infanticide. In fact a far more likely explanation is that Chinese couples systematically fail to report the birth of girls.
Adoptions rose sharply in the 1980s. There were over 500,000 cases in 1987 and about 400,000 per year between 1984 and 1986, compared with fewer than 200,000 before the one-child policy. The extremely low sex ratios of 27 to 36 boys per 100 girls among the adopted children are not surprising; parents traditionally are more likely to give away girls, a practice that intensified under the one-child stipulation. When the adopted children by year of adoption are added to their respective cohort of births, the sex ratio at birth comes closer to normal for the years in question. This reduces the number of missing girls by half.
In addition, girls in China, like girls in much of the developing world, receive far less attention and resources than boys. As a result the sex ratio of infant deaths in China averaged 114 over the 1980s This low ratio suggest that girls receive less care and attention than boys in many Chinese homes, reducing the chance of survival of girls beyond their first birthday. Most importantly, this gender discrimination affects girls most adversely in the poorest areas.
Because of the recent earthquake in China, that nation will relax its strict one-child policy to help parents who lost children in this month's devastating earthquake. The death toll has reached more than 65,080 people so far, with a further 23,150 missing. Officials have not been able to estimate the number of children killed. The May 12 quake was particularly painful because it killed so many only children. The Chengdu Population and Family Planning Committee in the capital of hard-hit Sichuan province said parents whose child was killed, severely injured or disabled in the quake could be issued with a certificate allowing them to have another child.
Since the earthquake, many Chinese have shown interest in adopting orphans. The recent announcement said there were no limits on the number of orphans a family could adopt. A couple that adopts would not be penalized if they later had a biological child.
As much as I hate governments intruding into the lives of its citizens, I must sadly agree with China’s efforts to control the population size of that nation. Without that control, China may not be able to feed its people and will end up looking to other nations for food.
UPDATE: (November 28, 2013) China has a change of heart. The government has decided to loosen its controversial one-child policy to permit millions of parents to have more than one child. One of the reasons is because too many female babies were being killed by their parents so that their parents could try again to get a male baby. Although the one-child policy did reduce the population by 400 million but after three decades of this policy being in effect, China has an increase in its older citizens. Of course there was a great deal of criticism world-wide about forced abortions being applied to parents who were about to have a second child. The one-child policy is still in effect however but where it is loosened is in rural areas of China (which is one third of China`s population) where the first child was a girl. Many Chinese parents are nevertheless happy with the one-child policy since raising two children is more than they can afford, considering the rise in the cost of living.
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