China\u27s Population Policy In Historical Context

The year 2014 marked the de facto end to China’s “one-child policy,” the most extreme example of state intrusion into the realm of reproduction. Deng Xiaoping’s 1979 initiative built on earlier, short-lived “birth planning” campaigns. The 1979 policy set an absolute population limit of 1.2 billion and tied this number to the goal of achieving modernization by 2000. A 1980 “Open Letter” defined the “one-child policy” as an absolute priority, and the government’s strict reinforcement of the policy in the early 1990s finally reduced rates of reproduction. This chapter chronicles the stages of policy implementation between 1979 and 2014 and places these developments against the backdrop of politics and the economy in the PRC and in the context of shifts in global population discourse over the same period. Even with the end of the one-child policy, China will feel its deep social, political, and demographic consequences for decades to come

The Population Factor: China\u27s Family Planning Policy In The 1990s

Realizing the extent of runaway population growth in China and the associated threat to the realization of overall domestic economic development, China\u27s leadership of 1980 set the goal of holding the country\u27s population within 1.2 billion by the year 2000. With few exceptions, the government called for all couples to have only 1 child. By 1990, different localities and regions had implemented their own policies. The state still held all urban couples with a single female child could have a 2nd child after a 5 year hiatus; a 3rd child was forbidden regardless of the sex of the 2nd child. The 1990 population census showed China\u27s population had grown to 1.13 billion by July 1 and by year\u27s end was over the 1.143 billion. The population is even likely to exceed 1.3 billion by the year 2000 and grow to 1.6 billion by the middle of the 21st century. This revelation sparked new calls for action and population control. In May 1991 the Chinese Communist Party Central Committee and State Council declared that population policy would not change, but that it should be strictly implemented especially in the countryside. A new family planning propaganda campaign was in evidence in many towns and villages in the summer of 1991, but nothing yet indicates whether the campaign proved successful. Sections discuss in greater detail the evolution of the birth planning policy and implementation of the one-child policy

China’s One-Child Policy

In 1979 China’s “one-child-per-couple” policy, or one-child policy, was launched. The policy was part of a multifaceted reform program pursued by the new regime under Deng Xiaoping, and its goal was to limit young, childbearing-age couples to only one child or, failing that, two children. With a population of about 1 billion in 1980, China’s leaders were convinced that only a strict program of population control would make it possible for China to achieve its development goal of “modernization by the year 2000.” This radical social engineering effort was directly at odds with much of China’s reform policy, which saw the state begin to retreat from its pervasive role in every aspect of family and social life. By subjecting childbearing to direct state regulation—that is, claiming that the state had the right and obligation to decide who was allowed to have a child and when—childbearing was effectively “collectivized” at a time when the economy was heading the opposite direction. It is no surprise, then, that the progression of the one-child policy was followed very closely by scholars, journalists, and human rights activists. An impressive body of scholarship has been compiled on this topic, despite serious constraints on research in the 1980s and 1990s. Four national censuses and annual sample surveys have helped improve the quality of demographic data available, but data on policy implementation has been patchy. As a result, two types of studies are dominant: (a) comprehensive works that provide an overview of policy evolution, implementation, and outcomes and (b) case studies that provide more detailed analysis of local policy processes. A third category of scholarship explores the impact and consequences of enforcement, particularly a skewed sex ratio at birth and a rapidly aging population. The scholarship on the one-child policy reflects the nature of the topic, which is broadly interdisciplinary, and the policy has been of great interest not only to political scientists but also to sociologists, economists, anthropologists, historians, and demographers. The works included here bear witness to this breadth of scholarly interest.</p

Postrevolutionary Mobilization In China: The One-Child Policy Reconsidered

The modernization or developmental model of communist regimes has been widely criticized, but the concept of revolutionary and postrevolutionary phases has endured. Implied in the dichotomy is a fundamental conflict between the politics of revolutionary mobilization (characterized by the push to disrupt and transform bourgeois routines and institutions of the old regime) and the postrevolutionary politics of regularized decision making and institutionalized party rule. The author uses the post-Mao Chinese experience and a case study of China\u27s one-child policy to argue that variant forms of mobilization have remained an integral part of the postrevolutionary Chinese political process, as the Deng regime attempts to rearrange the institutions and routines characteristic of Maoist China rapidly and fundamentally, while preserving a Leninist political order