We are witnessing one of the greatest ironies of modern history: the population policy of the Chinese government. The state’s coercive one-child policy—complete with forced birth control, sterilizations, late (even caesarean) abortions, and likely infanticide—began officially in 1979 and went on for more than 35 years. It was gradually softened, beginning in 2013.
In 2021 the plan was completely revised—even reversed.
The government’s goal now is to increase population by increasing fertility. The government not only allows a woman to have three children (and upon application probably more), it has adopted “financial, tax, insurance, education, housing, employment and other support measures” to make child bearing easier, write Yping Cai and Bohon Liu in the Jindal Global Law Review. [1]
And yet women’s fertility level remains below the reproduction rate. Most Chinese women, it seems, do not want to have more than one child. China’s population declined for the first time in 2022 [2], and China is no longer the most populous country; India is.
Where to Start?
There is so much for an onlooker (such as myself) to explore in this tragic decades-long experiment that I can only lightly summarize here, relying on experts, who sometimes disagree.
I should note first that the limits on birth started early in the 1970s, not in 1979. There was a supposedly voluntary program called “later, longer, fewer“—that is, women should have children later, wait longer, and produce fewer. According to Martin Whyte et al., “The post-1970 campaign in no way relied simply upon persuasion or voluntary compliance. Many of the coercive enforcement techniques that became notorious after the one-child policy was launched in 1980 actually date from this ’later, longer, fewer’ campaign of the 1970s.”[3]
Why the One-Child Policy?
It appears that Deng Xiaoping, who became leader of the People’s Republic of China in 1978, thought that the way to increase per capita income was to limit population numbers. There’s a certain logic there. However, it was Deng’s relaxation of restrictions on local village enterprises that led to the enormous China economic boom. That economic policy, regardless of his population policy, would have led to lower fertility, as economic growth normally does in developed countries.
Another reason for the one-child policy is that China seemed to have more people than its economy could employ. Superficially, wrote Leo Goodstadt in 1982, agriculture was severely overpopulated; more farm mechanization “would throw more than half of the 300 million persons in the agricultural labor force out of work.”[4 ] Similarly, in the cities, “the official estimate is that through increased productivity, two-thirds of the labor force employed in manufacturing, construction, communications, and transport in 1977 could have been laid off with no reduction in total output.”[5]
So, fewer people would be better, it seemed.
But the policy would not have been adopted without the support of scientists. Susan Greenhalgh, writing in 2003, argued that “a handful of maverick control theorists and engineers” took over China’s population studies in the late 1970s. [6] Led by Song Jian, a defense scientist, they echoed the alarm over excess population that was roiling the West, exemplified by the Club of Rome’s mechanistic predictions.[7]
“[P]ractically all the key ideas on which China’s one-child policy was based were borrowed from the West, and from Western science at that,” Greenhalgh contends.[8]
So, How Was the Policy Carried Out?
Giving birth, and deciding to give birth, are intensely personal decisions. Thus the only way the policy could be effective was through a myriad of government “enforcers” who oversaw local demographics, family by family.
“These birth planning enforcers kept detailed records on each woman of child-bearing age under their responsibility, including past births, contraceptive usage and even menstrual cycles, ” write Whyte et al., “and in many reported instances becoming ‘menstrual monitors’ who tried to detect out-of-quota pregnancies at an early stage.”[9]
According to Yong Cai and Wang Feng, one reason the policy continued as long as it did was that the local government birth planners reaped rewards. “Local birth planning apparatuses quickly became largely self-supporting institutions, relying heavily on fines collected from families under the name of ‘social compensation fees’ levied on violations to policies, mostly on out-of-plan births. “[10] A chilling incentive.
What Were the Results?
Coercive birth control had a number of negative results. In addition to the trauma that many families experienced:
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- The preference for boys raised the ratio of men to women in China (3 to 4 percent more males than females nationally, in some places much more), with implications for marriage and future families.
- Thousands of abandoned baby girls were adopted, some 150,000 internationally.
- The average population of China is aging faster than it otherwise would have been.
But there was one other extraordinary result: a rise in the respect for—and power of—women. Traditionally in China, sons were favored and nurtured in ways that girls were not. One reason was the kinship system; when girls grew up they married and moved to their husbands’ kinship groups. Why waste resources when you are going to lose your child, anyway?
Under the one-child policy, however, many families’ only child was a girl. And that girl received the attention, resources (such as food), education, and encouragement that would previously have been supplied only to male children. The long-term denigration of women declined, perhaps even ended. [11]
While the one-child policy had that unexpected positive consequence, it was a horrid ordeal. It illustrates, once again, the harm and sorrow created by overweening governmental power. As Yong Cai and Wang Feng write, “China’s one-child policy is one of the largest and most controversial social engineering projects in human history.”[12] And one of the most regrettable as well.
Notes (Comments follow the notes)
[1] Yping Cai, and Bohon Liu, ”From Birth Control to Pronatalism: Population Policy and Women’s Reproductive Rights in China since the 1980s,” Jindal Global Law Review 15, (2024) 267–289.
[2] “China Population 1960–2024,“ Macrotrends, https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/chn/china/population.
[3] Martin King Whyte, Wang Feng, Yong Cai, “Challenging the Myths of China’s One-Child Policy,” The China Journal 74 (July 2015).
[4] Leo F. Goodstadt, “China’s One-Child Family: Policy and Public Response,” Population and Development Review 8, no. 1 (1982): 37–58, at 41.
[5] Goodstadt, 42.
[6] Susan Greenhalgh, “Science, Modernity, and the Making of China’s One-Child Policy,” Population and Development Review 29, no. 2 (June 2003), 163–196, at 187.
[7] Donella H. Meadows, Dennis L. Meadows, Jørgen Randers, and William Behrens III, The Limits to Growth (Signet, 1972), https://www.clubofrome.org/publication/the-limits-to-growth/.
[8] Susan Greenhalgh, 166.
[9] Whyte et al.
[10] Yong Cai and Wang Feng, “The Social and Sociological Consequences of China’s One-Child Policy, “ Annual Review of Sociology 47 (2021), 587–60, at 601.
[11] See Patrick Body, “Women in Leadership: How Can Businesses Cultivate Gender Parity?” CKGSB Knowledge, January 10, 2025, https://english.ckgsb.edu.cn/knowledge/article/breaking-barriers-women-in-leadership-roles-in-china/#:~. It could not have been written a few decades ago.
[11] Yong Cai and Wang Feng, “The Social and Sociological Consequences of China’s One-Child Policy, “ Annual Review of Sociology 47 (2021), 587–606, at 588.
Image above is from picryl.com and is in the public domain.
I am not sure what “gloved quasi-fascism” means, but I am upset by the implication that policies carried out by China’s totalitarian government are analogous to U.S. laws and policies that Mr. Natelson disagrees with. However unwise or burdensome he deems particular U.S. laws and policies, it’s very dangerous to demonize or denigrate the other side. This is what his reply does, and what many people today do, on the left and the right, and it is a dead end for us as a democracy.
In response to Jane’s very interesting Blog, I would add that the hu-kou (household registration) system is what made enforcement of the one-child policy possible.
At this time, there was no freedom of movement within China. Rather, people belonged to a village or work-unit, from which they could not move without permission. This is what prevented the creation of giant city slums (such as we’ve seen in Brazil, India, and other countries). When China industrialized, more rural people were allowed to move to the urban factory jobs that needed filling.
The hu-kou system still exists, but apparently has been somewhat modified.
The Party members in charge of the particular work-unit
were responsible for enforcing the one-child policy, and monitored people on this (and on other matters, such as ideology, access to higher education, etc.). The local leaders established yearly quotas for births, and too often abused their power (for instance, favoring and covering up for their friends and relatives, and people who were well connected, while forcing abortions on others).
I would add that infanticide of female infants has a long history in China. As one classic text noted, approvingly, “when a son is born, he is placed on a bed, clothed in robes, and given a jade scepter,” but “when a girl is born, she is placed on the floor.”
A final word — I am not in favor of central planning, much less of forced abortions and deprivation of liberty, but you have to admire the economic success that China has achieved over the past 30 years. From a poor rural country, China has become industrialized and rich, and as a result, ordinary people are much better off than they used to be.
Jane, this entire situation has been tragic for the families involved, and I am a believer that people inherently know what actions are best for themselves.
Just as people spend their money more efficiently and wisely than the government can possibly do, it is important that we limit government spending to those areas where there is no alternative – highways, nuclear deterrence, etc.
It follows that the government should also stay out of people’s lives – whether it be light bulbs, shower heads, or those precious babies. Families see what’s going on in the economy, and population trends will be self-adjusting. No need for the central planners to issue dicta.
I voted as a McGovern Democrat when I got out of college, registered Republican when I started paying real taxes, then lost faith in all of them and switched to Independent.
I returned to the GOP fold because I thought it important to have a vote in the Pennsylvania primary in 2024, and I’m glad I did. Now I am about to take the next step – registering as a Libertarian.
The Libertarian credo: Limited government, individual liberty, rule of law. I would like to see all of us live this way – including the Chinese who have been shamefully treated in the area most sacred to any family.
Thank you very much for this post.
The Chinese government’s population policy has been a complex and controversial issue. The one-child policy, though officially starting in 1979, had roots in the 1970s with the “later, longer, fewer” campaign. Many argue that the coercive measures used during this period had long-lasting social and economic impacts. Despite its reversal in 2021, the effects of these policies continue to shape China’s demographic landscape. How does the current population policy address the challenges left by decades of strict birth control?
Yet another, particularly sad, lesson in the folly of central planning.
Recently I’ve been mulling the question of why, despite the repeated failures of central planning, it continues to beguile people?
I think the answer, at least in this country, is propaganda. Propaganda that is largely a product of the federal bureaucracy and allied politicians. Because federal money and power are everywhere these days—we have developed into a gloved quasi-fascism (the gloves came off during the Biden administration)—the message is seconded by the education establishment, NGOs, media, state and local governments, and on and on.
Over the course of my long life, the alleged reasons for the propaganda have changed: In the 1960s it was discrimination and poverty. In the 1970s, consumer protection, pollution, and global cooling. In more recent decades, global warming and health care. But while the premise changes, the solution is ALWAYS the same: ever more power for the DC establishment, ever more central planning.
The propaganda is as all-encompassing as water around fish: Even my local garbage truck sports environmental propaganda.
At the international level, the UN and other international entities carry on the campaign. And for authoritarian governments like that of China, it is indispensable.
So generation after generation fails to learn a lesson that should be as axiomatic as 2+2=4.