This week, I read a few scholarly articles to dig into the historical reasons and process of China’s one-child policy to help me learn more about what aspects of the topic would I be interested to analyze and present. With the datasets available at hand and some literacy support, I eventually narrowed it down to two topics: one-child policy’s influence on the population structure and its influence on the sex ratio.
As the rapid population growth became a potential risk to political stability and a hindrance to economic development, there had been a global movement of birth control (the national population policy in India, the establishment of the International Planned Parenthood Federation, the first UN-organized World Population Conference was held in 1974 in Bucharest). While China’s family planning policy can be seen as part of a global movement, it was the strictest and the most long-lasting one among all, best known for its one-child policy. The main questions here is, whether the one-child policy lived up to its expectations after around 40 years of conducting and how has it fundamentally changed the structure of China’s population?
One of the most extinguished one is the rise in sex ratio in early 2000s, when the policy was conducted at a strictest level. Especially in areas where boys were valued higher than girls, sex-selective abortions became prevalent even though the government has banned hospitals from reveling the sex of the baby to parents. In addition, infection rates of sterilizations varied from place to place, which reflected a combined impact of the family-planning policy and regional health care development on women of child-bearing age.
To figure out whether one-child policy reached its purpose of effective birth control in a broader sense, I was inspired by the article Population, Policy, and Politics: How will history judge China’s one-child policy (2012) by Feng et al. and planned to compared the birth rate of China and tens of other countries who had a similar birth rate as China did when the one-child policy began (World Population Prospects). Child and old-age dependency rates will also be compared and analyzed to show how the policy has changed the population structure.
Population, Policy, and Politics: How Will History Judge China’s One-Child Policy?