China's One-Child Policy

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 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 Zedong's death in

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rd, 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 that the revolution was losing steam, initiated the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (beginning in 1966), which prompted more purges of intellectuals and plunged China into nearly a decade of turmoil. China's population-

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