Essays On China'S One-Child Policy

Over time, implementing the One-Child Policy not only established a well-organized bureaucracy ensuring a confined birth rate, but also transformed PRC into a nation with the largest community-based contraceptive system.

Informed by a neo-Malthusian population theory that regarded population growth as the most serious problem of the modern world, the leadership began to associate a large population with the many problems that China was facing: poverty, inadequate education, pollution, and unemployment.These means established a reward/penalty system to confine the numbers of children per household.Among the rewards, the government promised free access to birth control supplies, intrauterine devices (IUD), abortive operations, sterilization, and paid vacations for those seeking birth control methods.At the same time, the PRC Marriage Law was revised, stating that birth planning was a legal responsibility for both husband and wife.The central government also suggested concrete means for implementing the One-Child Policy.Health care subsidies, guaranteed retirement income, privileged housing opportunities, and other benefits were also distributed to parents of single children.Parents giving birth to more than two children, on the other hand, had to offer 10% of their salaries as an excess-child penalty for fourteen years for each out-of-plan child.Although available alternatives suggested milder tactics for population regulation, the Party gradually leaned toward a proposal from a group of cybernetics scientists who suggested an immediate and stringent control of China’s population.From the late 1960s to the mid-1970s, western countries witnessed the rise of a neo-Malthusian school of thought that predicted mass starvation as the inevitable consequence of rapidly growing populations.The Club of Rome, a prominent think tank based at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, espoused this alarmist thought.The name Club of Rome thus became synonymous with the neo-Malthusian formulation among Chinese experts versed in population sciences.