China Announces Birthrate Reduction Plans

Date August 11, 1979

China adopted a controversial one-child-per-family policy with the goal of keeping China’s population from growing beyond 1.2 billion people in the year 2000. The plan met with resistance in China and was criticized by the West.

Locale Beijing, China

Key Figures

• Chen Muhua (b. 1921), vice premier of China and head of the State Family Commission
• Deng Xiaoping (Teng Hsiao-p’ing; 1904-1997), paramount leader of the People’s Republic of China in a variety of top positions, 1977-1989
• Steven W. Mosher (b. 1948), American anthropologist

Summary of Event

On August 11, 1979, the Chinese Communist Party newspaper Renmin ribao (People’s Daily) published an article by Vice Premier Chen Muhua, who was also head of the State Family Commission, titled “To Realize the Four Modernizations, It Is Necessary to Control Population Increase in a Planned Way.” The article announced government plans to implement a controversial one-child-per-family policy to slow China’s demographic explosion and to keep China’s population from growing beyond 1.2 billion by the year 2000. The long-term goal of Beijing’s population planning was the reduction of China’s population to between 650 and 750 million in one hundred years, a level considered to be the point at which China can safely feed itself and prosper. The stated goal of the population control program was to ensure the success of the Communist Party’s “four modernizations”—the modernization of agriculture, industry, science and technology, and defense by the year 2000—but the one-child-per-family program in China had even wider implications for the global environment and world health.

As the Chinese effort represented the most aggressive family-planning and population control program in the developing world, it was immediately watched closely by population planners around the world. Furthermore, because Chinese people represent one-fifth of humanity, China’s environmental successes and failures have international repercussions. For example, China’s reliance on coal-fired electricity has implications for international efforts to reduce fossil-fuel emissions to stem possible global warming. Furthermore, as China’s economic growth averaged around 10 percent between 1978 and 1993 and maintained a robust rate into the early twenty-first century, it is expected that China’s consumption of resources will grow. Attempts to limit China’s population growth are thus of special concern around the world.

China experienced a demographic explosion in the 1950’s and 1960’s, primarily as a result of greater political stability, better health care (including a dramatic reduction in infant mortality), improved nutrition, and the government’s relative indifference to increased birthrates. In the early years after the Communist takeover of China in 1949, families were encouraged to have more children to expand the labor pool needed to build a new, socialist China. Mao Zedong, chairman of the Communist Party and leader of the revolution, thought of China’s large population (542 million at the time of liberation) as an asset rather than as a liability. A 1953 census showed that the population was growing at an alarming rate of more than 2 percent per annum, leading some in the party to begin thinking about programs to reduce fertility. These programs could not accomplish much, however, because of political turmoil associated with Mao’s Great Leap Forward of the late 1950’s and the Cultural Revolution of the mid-1960’s. The Great Leap Forward itself induced famine that killed tens of millions of Chinese, dampening for a short time the pace in population growth.

Serious population control programs did not commence until 1971, when the government issued State Council Directive Number 51, which ushered in a sweeping birth control plan known as wan xi shao, promoting later marriage, longer spacing between births, and fewer total births. The program emphasized raising the marriage age for women to twenty-three and that of men to twenty-five, a birth quota system ensuring a four-year interval between births, and no more than two children per family. The state also made contraceptive devices widely available and lifted restrictions on abortions and sterilizations. As a result, Chinese fertility rates dropped substantially, plummeting nearly 50 percent between 1970 and 1979, from 34 births per 1,000 population to fewer than 18 births per 1,000.

Despite such successes, Chinese population planners in the late 1970’s, perhaps influenced by notions of zero population growth popular in the United States, became convinced that even more comprehensive measures would be necessary to curb a second explosion of China’s population, as China’s baby boomers would come of child-bearing age in the 1980’s and early 1990’s. Thus, in August, 1979, the one-child policy was launched. To implement the program, the government used both moral and material incentives. Whereas earlier birth control programs had been presented to the masses as desirable for the health and welfare of the mother and child, the new policy exhorted the Chinese people to have only one child as a patriotic contribution to the four modernizations program and as a gesture of concern for the welfare of future generations.

Material incentives were also offered. Because the program was administered at the local level, incentives varied, but in urban areas, most couples pledging to have no more than one child were awarded 5 to 8 percent of their salary as a monthly or annual bonus, a benefit that would continue until their child reached fourteen years of age. A couple would be obliged to pay back all the money if they had a second child. Priority for housing allocations was also given to one-child families. In rural areas, extra work points were paid to one-child families, and in some places, a onetime cash bonus was offered. After a couple had their first child, they were often subjected to intense pressure to undergo sterilization or to have an IUD inserted. A woman who was pregnant with an “extra-quota” child was pressured, and sometimes coerced, into having the fetus aborted.

Significance

The one-child policy sent shock waves throughout China and proved to be controversial throughout the world as well. At the provincial and grassroots level, one-child directives from Beijing met with considerable resistance. Because the issue was so sensitive, the central government never passed a national family-planning law. In the absence of such a law, the central government had little power to punish those who violated the one-child policy, apart from withholding one-child benefits. In urban areas, where living space, allocated by the state, is at a premium and workers can count on pensions in their old age, the one-child incentives met with the most success, because the state’s power to reward and punish these urban workers was greatest. In the cities, the fertility rate dropped to 1.2 children per couple, but in rural areas, the figure never dropped below 2.5 children per couple, a figure well above the single-child goal. This difference is important, because 80 percent of China’s population resides in the countryside. Rural compliance is thus crucial to any effort to stem China’s population tide.

Several reasons can be offered for the strong resistance to the one-child policy in rural areas. First, the state has fewer instruments of persuasion in the countryside compared with its influence on urban residents. Except for rural party cadres and other government officials, virtually no one in the countryside can count on a pension; parents are forced to rely on their children (invariably their sons, as daughters are by tradition sent to their husbands’ households) for support in their old age. The more sons a couple has, the more secure the couple can expect to be in old age. Thus, if a rural couple’s first child is female, there are strong practical reasons to reproduce until a son is born. Second, the party’s own agricultural reforms, initiated by Deng Xiaoping in 1978, proved incompatible with population goals in rural areas because, as a part of agricultural reforms, land was allocated according to household size, and larger families could generate more income if more family members were available for new enterprises permitted by the reforms. Many rural families concluded that it would be more lucrative to have more children and to pay the fines for noncompliance with the one-child policy.

Rural party cadres responsible for implementing the one-child policy were often sympathetic to the plight of families without a son and often had difficulty enforcing the one-child provisions. In other areas, however, local officials implemented the policy overzealously, forcing sterilizations and, in some cases, forcing abortions. In Broken Earth (1983), anthropologist Steven W. Mosher documented these coercive methods, which included second- and third-trimester abortions, and set off a firestorm of criticism in the West, especially in the United States. Conservatives in the United States often referred to China’s population control measures as an example of the worst kind of intrusion into the private lives and human rights of China’s citizens, and they called for an adjustment of relations with China. Abortion opponents successfully pressured U.S. presidential administrations to withhold contributions to the United Nations Fund for Population Activities (UNFPA), thereby reducing the ability of the United Nations to promote fertility-reduction programs worldwide.

Criticism of some of the side effects of the one-child policy was not limited to the West: In the 1980’s, stern official condemnations of apparently rampant levels of female infanticide began appearing in the Chinese press. Indeed, statistics show that in the years following 1983, the ratio of infant boys to infant girls averaged 111 to 100, far above the typical gender ratio of 105 to 106 male babies for each 100 female babies. Other, more long-term problems were recognized, most notably the prospect of the rapid aging of the Chinese population that will occur while fewer children will be available to support this large elderly population.

If judged by its own standard definition of success, the one-child policy has not been completely successful. Planners had hoped that China’s population would be no more than 1.2 billion by the year 2000, but the actual population at that time was slightly larger than that. It is clear, however, that without the one-child campaign, China’s population would have grown even faster. The slowdown of population growth was crucial, because China was in the midst of a sweeping modernization process that would place increasing pressure on China’s natural resources and environment. Another concern was the sharp decline in per-capita arable cropland, some of which was threatened by erosion, salinity, industrial pollution, and desertification. Population pressure in rural areas was also responsible for China’s dwindling forests. All of these pressures have continued into the twenty-first century, as economic growth in China continued to accelerate.

Perhaps the most important lesson from the Chinese experience is that successful population control programs must take existing cultural and social circumstances into consideration. In the case of China, it was clear that a population control program would have to be accompanied by other social welfare programs, including state-funded provisions for retirement income. Because the Chinese government was willing to issue one-child decrees but apparently unable to fund programs that would alter material incentives for the majority of its citizens to have fewer children, the program ultimately met with mixed results. China’s population reached nearly 1.3 billion in the early twenty-first century, and if fertility cannot be reduced further, the population could top the 2 billion mark by the year 2050, although alternative scenarios indicate that if current fertility trends continue, China may well experience a period of depopulation by that time.

Bibliography

Banister, Judith. China’s Changing Population. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1985. Comprehensive and well-researched account of China’s fertility transition and the one-child policy. Uses both English-language and Chinese-language sources. Well documented with facts and figures.

Burns, John P., and Stanley Rosen, eds. Policy Conflicts in Post-Mao China. Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1986. This useful collection of essays and documents is an excellent introduction to recent trends in politics and government in China. Includes a concise chapter on population issues as well as a study exploring fertility patterns in rural Shaanxi Province. Also includes a list of further readings.

Croll, Elisabeth, Delia Davin, and Peggy Kane, eds. China’s One-Child Family Policy. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1985. An excellent collection of essays from sociologists, political scientists, and demographers with expertise in family planning and women’s issues in China. Each essay includes a useful reference list, and most essays are accompanied by charts and tables that clearly illustrate and explain demographic trends in China.

England, Robert Stowe. Aging China: The Demographic Challenge to China’s Economic Prospects. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2005. Analysis of the significant economic, market, social, and demographic factors that will shape China’s future as its population ages.

He Bochuan. China on the Edge: The Crisis of Ecology and Development. San Francisco: China Books and Periodicals, 1991. A translation of a book widely circulated in China that documents environmental degradation in China and calls for strong remedial measures, including population control. Documents many failures of policy that led to environmental disasters in China.

Mosher, Steven W. Broken Earth: The Rural Chinese. New York: Free Press, 1983. A penetrating look at life in rural China. Includes controversial sections on the implementation of the one-child policy in the countryside.