China's One Child Policy

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The Chinese One Child Policy

As China is having an enormous economic expansion it is also facing many problems. One of the major problems people have become more and more concerned about is the country's population. At the dawn of this century there were some 426 million people living in China. Today the population is about 1.2 billion. About two-thirds of this 900 million increase was added within the last 50 years. In another word, the population has tripled since the People's Republic of China was grounded. Today the mainland China alone contributes to at least 20% of the world's population.

It is also very well known all over the world that in China couples nowadays are not allowed to have more than one child. This policy was first hinted by Jiang Zemin in a 1979 speech and was in place nationwide by 1981. It has received lot of criticism from almost every corner of the world ever since. Many people, especially people in western countries, consider this policy as a strong violation of human rights.

According to the Chinese tradition there must be a boy among the children in order to continue the family. Many infant females have been abandoned or even worse, killed in order to have another child, hopefully a boy. People can also check the baby's gender with the help of technologies during the pregnancy and many female infants were aborted before they are born. The problem following the phenomenon is the unbalanced sex ratio among younger population. There are simply not enough girls. This problem will probably be relevant in a couple of years when today's teenagers are about to get married and have families. It is not known how serious the problem will be but it will certainly draw much attention both in China and all...

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...ise enormous. Whatever the size of China's population is at the dawn of the 21st century it is certain to account of twenty percent of the world's projected population. Since the world's population is nearing the limit of what the earth could handle, the problem of China's population is also becoming a global concern. Even though the birth rate in China has dropped from 33.43 per thousand in 1970 to 21.06 per thousand in 1990, and the average children has declined from 5.01 per woman in 1970 to 2.31 per woman in 1990, China still has the a yearly increase of 17 million people and more than a quarter of the annual addition to the national income is consumed by new population born during the year. Many people claim that China should wait for a higher economic level to initiate a natural decline in birth rate as the way it has been for other industrialized countries.

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China's One Child Policy