Population Control Efforts in China

The PeopleÆs Republic of China is obsessed with controlling its population growth, and with good reason: A fifth of the planetÆs six billion people live in China. By comparison to America, China packs four and a half times more people into an area slightly larger than the United States, which had a population of 250 million in 1990. Every birth is another mouth to feed and another person to house in a nation running out of both commodities.

China has long been an impoverished nation mostly made up of peasants (85 percent of the population at the time of the Communist revolution in 1949). Prior to 1949, food production barely kept pace with population growth, and in each generation famine killed, on average, 4.5 percent of the population, a figure that reached as high as 9 percent in northern China. As recently as the early 1960s, incompetent planning by the state, coupled with drought and stor

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armers into communes. The economists who had urged population control measures were purged in the resulting frenzy and China continued to add people at a rapid rate. The Great Leap Forward proved to be a great leap backward, and a tragedy for many of ChinaÆs peasants. The mismanagement of the agricultural sector, coupled with drought and floods, caused a famine that killed millions. The governmentÆs population control efforts did not restart until 1962, and then only as an attempt to maintain revolutionary zeal. The Communists began their new program by declaring that ôsex and childbearing sapped the physical and emotional strength of both wives and husbandsö and thus hindered the continuing revolution. Popular resistance to the stateÆs birth-control efforts remained strong. Finally, in 1964, the Communists created the National Family Planning Office. Its first directive stated that couples should have no more than two children, with five-year intervals in between. Couples could have a third child, but that was the limit. Better organization and superior contraceptives (such as IUDs) made the second campaign more successful than the first. Once again, though, ChinaÆs political realm swung radical. Mao, fearing th
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Approximate Word count = 4263
Approximate Pages = 17 (250 words per page)

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