What Was China’s One-Child Policy? Its Implications and Importance

“Indian women with a single child are no more likely to engage in paid work than those with more children,” she says. Couples with a single child do not work longer, or have more free time either. Instead, educated couples preferred to make a greater commitment to one child than split the family’s time and resources among two or more siblings. This, they believe, gives that one child a better education, a monopoly on the family’s attention, and eventually a greater advantage in the job market.

Urban, middle-class couples face mounting financial pressure, including the cost of raising children and of caring for the elderly. While the government has encouraged “high quality” urban women to give birth, rural and minority women are still discouraged from having more children. China’s one-child policy was implemented as a method of controlling the population.

1. Even after relaxing birth control policies to allow all couples to have two children in 2015, and three children in 2021, birth rates remain low, particularly among the urban middle class favoured by the government.
2. In China, which enforced a brutal one-child policy from 1979 to 2015, other repercussions are now apparent.
3. The one-child policy refers to a set of laws implemented in China beginning in 1979 in response to explosive population growth that government officials feared would lead to a demographic disaster.
4. This continues to affect marriage and birth rates around the country with fewer women of childbearing age in China.
5. The “one-child policy” – limiting births per couple through coercive measures – was implemented in the early 1980s, and fertility dropped dramatically.

Potential social problems & “little emperor” phenomenon

The policy mandated that the vast majority of couples in the country could have only one child. The phrase “one-child policy” was used often outside China but it can be a bit misleading. Exceptions were frequently made and local officials had discretion over how population limits were achieved. Despite declining birth rates, some politicians have advocated for the adoption of something like China’s former one-child policy in northern states with large Muslim populations. These calls have less to do with demographic reality, and more to do with majoritarian Hindu nationalist concerns around Muslim and “lower-caste” fertility. China has found that despite reversing course, it cannot undo this rapid demographic transition.

The one-child policy prompted the growth of orphanages in the 1980s.[183] For parents who had “unauthorized” births, or who wanted a son but had a daughter, giving up their child for adoption was a strategy to avoid penalties under one-child restrictions. Many orphanages witnessed an influx of baby girls, as families would abandon them in favor of having a male child.[15] Many families also kept their illegal children hidden so that they would not be punished by the government.[184] In fact, “out adoption” was not uncommon in China even before birth planning. The Chinese population did slow but the policy also resulted in unintended consequences such as an aging population, gender imbalance, and a shrinking workforce. Its discontinuation in 2015 and subsequent measures to encourage higher birth rates reflect China’s complex challenges in balancing population control with sustainable economic and social development. On 31 May 2021, China’s government relaxed restrictions even more, allowing women up to three children.[136][137][138][139] This change was brought about mainly due to the declining birth rate and population growth.

But despite a lower fertility rate, the country’s population is still growing. Reports surfaced of Chinese women giving birth to their second child overseas, a practice known as birth tourism. Likewise, a Hong Kong passport differs from China’s mainland passport by providing additional advantages.[example needed] Recently[when?

Their undocumented status makes it impossible for them to legally leave China. They can’t register for a passport and they have no access to public education. China’s population was quickly approaching one billion by the late 1970s, however, and the Chinese government considered ways to curb population growth.

In both countries, skewed sex ratios caused by sex selective abortions have led to a range of social problems, including forced marriages and human trafficking. The one-child policy was managed by the National Population and Family Planning Commission under the central government since 1981. The Ministry of Health of the People’s Republic of China and the National Population and Family Planning Commission were made defunct and a new single agency, the National Health and Family Planning Commission, took over national health and family planning policies in 2013. China had a rise in the abortion of female fetuses, the number of baby girls left in orphanages, and even infanticides of baby girls with the implementation of the one-child policy and the preference for male children. The efficacy of the policy itself has been challenged, however, because population growth generally slows as societies gain in income as happened in China during this time. The death rate declined, too, as the birth rate declined in China and life expectancy increased.

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Even after relaxing birth control policies to allow all couples to have two children in 2015, and three children in 2021, birth rates remain low, particularly among the urban middle class favoured by the government. In April 1992, China implemented laws that enabled foreigners to adopt their orphan children, with the number of children each orphanage could offer for international adoption being limited by the China Center of Adoption Affairs. That same year, 206 children were adopted to the United States, according to the U.S. State Department.[190] Since then, the demand for healthy infant girls increased and transnational adoption increased rapidly. In accordance with this high demand, China began defining more restrictions on foreign adoption, including limitations on applicant’s age, marital status, mental and physical health, income, family size, and education.[190] According to the U.S. State Department, there have been over 80,000 international adoptions from China since international adoptions were implemented.

Contraception and sterilization

According to a study by Gustafson (2014), the one-child policy has led to a significant decrease in the availability of family caregivers for the elderly in China.[206] So, tens of millions of retirees now only have one child to rely on for care. This has led to an “inverted pyramid,” in which two sets of elderly parents must rely on a single married couple of two adult children (each of whom is an only child with no siblings), who in turn have produced a single child on whom the family must eventually rely on in the next generation. Introduced by the Chinese government in 1979 and formally ending in 2016, the one-child policy was a method of controlling the population.

Adam received his master’s in economics from The New School for Social Research and his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in sociology. He is a CFA charterholder as well as holding FINRA Series 7, 55 & 63 licenses. He currently researches and teaches economic sociology and the social studies of finance at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. But you’ve probably noticed it already, if not in your own or extended family, then in your neighbourhood, among your former batchmates and current colleagues. The worry here is that the coming population milestone will push India to adopt knee-jerk population policies. The idea the country should adopt something like China’s former “one-child policy” has been moving from the fringe to the political mainstream.

The priorities of individual one child policy in india families also played a role in the birth rate. Families debated the social and economic stability of the household prior to conception. In China, the government found that once fertility rates dropped, they were faced with an ageing population.

The Chinese government announced on Oct. 29, 2015 that the mandated policy was ended. Its rules were slowly relaxed to allow more couples fitting certain criteria to have a second child. A 2011 study conducted by the National Council for Applied Economic Research (NCAER) indicated that close to 10% of Indian households now opt for only one child, and nearly a quarter of college-educated women said they would prefer to have a single child. “There is a need to control the population for the development of the country, irrespective of whether it is the population of Hindus or Muslims or other religions,” said the Minister of State of Social Justice and Empowerment, whose Republican Party of India is part of the NDA government at the Centre. Dharini and Kunal Turakhia are careful to ensure that their only son, Dev, 11, spends time with his cousins, benefiting from the company while still having his parents all to himself.

Data from the Health Ministry’s most recent National Family Health Survey, released last week, showed India’s total fertility rate had dropped to 2.0, below the so-called replacement rate of 2.1 needed to maintain a stable population. In urban areas it was even lower, with an average of 1.6 children per woman. As in China, in some states in India, women’s education and their aspirations for their children have contributed to lower birth rates.

Because of this new belief, the population would be likely to keep declining, which could have tragic repercussions for China in the coming decades. The one-child policy refers to a set of laws implemented in China beginning in 1979 in response to explosive population growth that government officials feared would lead to a demographic disaster. China has a long history of encouraging birth control and family planning. The government began promoting birth control in the 1950s when population growth started to outpace the food supply. China has implemented or increased parental tax deductions, family leave, housing subsidies for families, and spending on reproductive health and childcare services to increase the national birth rate since ending the policy. The Chinese government also promotes flexible work hours and work-from-home options for parents.

The Family Planning Commission spread propaganda by placing pictures and images on everyday items.[108] Aside from signs and posters on billboards, advertisements were placed on postage stamps, milk cartons, food products and many other household items to promote the benefits of having one child. This continues to affect marriage and birth rates around the country with fewer women of childbearing age in China. The drop in birth rates meant fewer children, which occurred as death rates dropped and longevity rates rose. It’s estimated that the share of adults ages 65 and older will have risen from just 12% to a projected 26% by 2050.