China’s one-child-per-couple policy: A brief overview

By David Azócar

One in five people are born in China. The Asian giant’s population stands at 1.32 billion and growing. During the late 1970s, however, Chinese authorities undertook a policy of family planning which was the most aggressive in modern times: “One child per couple." Twenty years later, we offer an overview of this controversial, but highly effective, plan.

To provide context, Chile at more than sixteen million, is 82 times smaller than China. This gives the impression that the birth rate is phenomenally high. This is not the case, as fewer children are born to each couple in China than in Chile. How can this be? Let’s find out.

The story starts October, 1, 1949. Mao Zedong proclaims the birth of the People's Republic of China in Tiananmen Square. His new nation has no less than 560 million inhabitants. There were even periods when the government of Beijing had actually implored its nation to have more children. Population growth had often been associated with economic development, but it was not (at least not immediate growth).

The Great Leap Forward policy of the 1960s involved a number of changes to the Chinese economy. The policy, far from being a leap forward, led to the death of nearly 30 million in a catastrophic famine. Despite the death toll and efforts to reverse the changes made during the Great Leap, China was unable to avoid reaching 1 billion inhabitants by 1979.

One couple, one child

In 1979, Chinese authorities implemented a tough, new birth control policy. It was ostensibly aimed at boosting economic development, optimizing resources and improving the welfare of the people. Beijing was aware of the pressure to feed its people and took the plan very seriously. Thus began the "one couple, one child" campaign. At the outset, most couples had, on average, 2.75 children. By 2006, this figure had fallen to 1.72. Chile currently has 1.9 per couple according to Chile’s INE.

The Chinese Communist Party, under Deng Xiaoping, introduced a series of measures designed to achieve the birth rate goal. A number of benefits were available to couples who maintained the one child limit, as well as a complete set of penalties for those who did not; although larger families are allowed in some special areas or within certain ethnic minorities, especially smaller ones.

Benefits include larger grain allocations, quicker access to housing, more spacious dwellings and better furnishings. Conversely, violators lose the benefits mentioned above, and receive hefty fines, equivalent to more than three years' salary, and in some cases, job loss.

On the road to population control, China has faced a series of unwanted events, such as an increase in abortions, which are legal in China. What is worse is that many of them occur after 6 months into the pregnancy. By 1992, one-third of the 624,000 abortions performed in the province of Guangzhou were third trimester.

Even more alarming is that the majority were largely selective, since according to official statistics, 97.5% of aborted babies are girls. This reflects the belief that children must support the husband’s parents in their old age. This, among other issues, has resulted in the abandonment of girls and infanticide of female babies. This occurs mainly in rural areas, which include more than 70% of the country's population.

The Chinese state has made significant efforts to stop these issues. It has closed hospitals, punished illegal midwives and encouraged the use of contraception.

A higher proportion of boys have been born as a consequence of the measures and the public’s reaction to same. In some extreme cases, proportions of up to 164 boys per 100 girls under four years exist, such as in Lianyungang province. Thus, millions of young men will be unmarried in the future. A total of 99 cities had gender ratios higher than 125, per a Xinhua report quoting the Family Planning Association of China.

Another problem is that the policy on birth control is not equally applied to all, due to differences between geographic areas and ethnicity. For example, in Beijing or Shanghai, you may only have one child per couple, while in the country; the figure often rises to two or three per couple. The reason is that, in the view of the government, more hands are needed in the fields.

Minorities such as Tibetans, Mongolians, Uighurs, Miao and Chiang may have up to four children.

This is much a more complex issue than what it appears to be at first glance. Some research asserts that the measure has already been relaxed and that the total population is 1.6 billion, or nearly 300 million more than the official figure. Beijing denies these allegations and plans to maintain the one-child policy until at least 2020, when they hope to reach what they term equilibrium.

Over the past 25 years, China has avoided increasing the world’s population by 400 million human beings. It has saved itself a lot of money in doing so, not to mention the impacts on the environment, unemployment and poverty. This, at least, is the opinion of Wu Camping, professor of demographics at Renmin University in Beijing.

Only time will tell whether the one-child policy should be kept in place or relaxed.