China's Attempts to Limit Population Growth

In the past half-century, Chinese leaders have implemented numerous programs to limit the nation's population growth. The problem has only worsened, however. As a result, the predictions have become even more dire, the government's measures have become even more draconian, and the consequences for China's women and children have become even more harsh. This paper will examine China's 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 People's Republic of China is obsessed with controlling its population growth, and with good reason: A fifth of the planet's 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 China's peasants. The mismanagement of the agricultural sector, coupled with drought and floods, caused a famine that killed millions. The government's 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 "sex and childbearing sapped the physical and emotional strength of both wives and husbands" and thus hindered the continuing revolution. Popular resistance to the state's 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, China's political realm swung radical. Mao, fearing th

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