Mary Davis' Take on "China' One Child Policy"

         In 1978, the new Chairman Deng Xiaoping reversed many of the previous Chairman Mao’s policies, including discouraging large families. This was due to China’s population growth that would only continue and put a strain on their sparce resources. The most controversial policy Chairman Deng established was a one-child-per-family policy. While there were some exceptions for farmers and minorities, the punishment for forbidden children was severe and include forced abortions, sterilizations, and the extermination of infants. The government became concerned about the ‘birth dearth’- whether the population would continue to rise to keep the economy growing and society functioning. And so, in 2015, the policy was relaxed to allow two children to families. And although the one-child policy was terminated, birthrates have remained low. India did not have the same success as China with their form of population control - obligatory sterilization. Public outrage forced the government to turn over control to the individual states and their population is still expected to reach 1.7 billion by 2050 while China on the other hand, will reach zero population growth by 2030.

While the one-child policy sought to limit population growth so that the country and its populist could enjoy a higher quality of life, it raises the question regarding individual rights versus the collective rights. A society is created with the expectation of basic individual rights and freedoms independent of any government policies or regulations. With the government regulating reproductive rights, it viewed humans as a group with economic implications rather than individuals that made up that community. Of course, even with the policy in place, there were exceptions for rural areas where families needed extra hands in the fields or if the parent’s job was a hazardous one. Even with these exceptions, the atrocities carried out against women as the actual enforcement of the policy included job loss, abortions – either forced or used for sex-selection, child abandonment, infanticide and in 222 million cases, sterilization (Jian, 2013).                                                                                                       

Along with the savage acts of enforcement, there were other impacts of the policy. With the individual families choosing male children over females, a gender imbalance was created where now there are 30 million more men than women (NPR 2016). In addition to too many men, a lack of siblings and in future generations, a lack of aunts and uncles, leave a rapidly aging population with only one child to care for multiple elderly relatives. This is referred to as the 4-2-1 problem – 4 grandchildren, 2 parents and one child (Cunningham 2016).

With the estimated 40 million births that the one-child policy prevented, the imbalances to the country’s food supply and natural resources subsided. However, with the now smaller labor force, China may not be able to continue a successful economic growth. With this threat looming, the government has now taken the opposite stance and are focused on woman having more children to increase the country’s birthrate (Guardian 2019).

China still has the world's largest population and a responsibility to provide for its citizens and will therefore promote policies that they believe will help the community survive, whether it respects individual rights or not. As they have discovered, using the extreme policy of limiting the birthrate has created more and continuing issues. Rather than creating these policies that truly tend to disregard individual’s reproductive rights, the government should allow its citizens the opportunity to make their own choices regarding their family size. It all comes down to the basic fundamental that public policy needs to balance human rights and obligations to economic attainability.

REFERENCES

Cunningham, W. P., & Cunningham, M. A. (2013). Principles of environmental science: Inquiry & application. McGraw-Hill.

Guardian News and Media. (2019, March 2). Can China recover from its DISASTROUS one-child policy? The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/mar/02/china-population-control-two-child-policy.

Jian, M. (2013, May 22). China's brutal one-child policy. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/22/opinion/chinas-brutal-one-child-policy.html.

NPR. (2016, February 1). How China's one-child policy led to forced Abortions, 30 Million Bachelors. NPR. https://www.npr.org/2016/02/01/465124337/how-chinas-one-child-policy-led-to-forced-abortions-30-million-bachelors.