A Chinese Tragedy

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:

• • 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.