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Population Control Efforts in China

In the past half-century, Chinese leaders have implemented numerous programs to limit the nationÆs population growth. The problem has only worsened, however. As a result, the predictions have become even more dire, the governmentÆs measures have become even more draconian, and the consequences for ChinaÆs women and children have become even more harsh. This paper will examine ChinaÆs attempts to limit its population growth, with particular emphasis on its one-child policy and the effect of that plan on the rights of women and children.

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 storms, led to a famine that claimed the lives of tens of millions of Chinese, mostly children. That specter still hangs over China today.

For the most part, though, China has moved past the point of mere subsistence, thanks largely to economic reforms initiated in the late 1970s. The abject failure of Communism became apparent after Mao ZedongÆs death in 1976, when anecdotal and statistical evidence indicated that rural living standards had either stagnated or declined since the 195...

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Population Control Efforts in China. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 10:36, March 29, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1712870.html