Title
Behind Family Planning Policies
A data visualization project: looking at China’s One-Child Policy in a broader sense
Brief Description
The data visualization project looks into the necessity and impacts of China’s One-Child Policy through comparing its trends in the birth rate, sex ratio, and fertility rate with nine other similar countries. Starting with a comparison between China and India and their different policies as the two most populated countries in the world, the work moves on to examine the overall trend among the ten countries. Influences of the One-Child Policy have been reported in an overwhelmingly negative way, and is it possible that China was singled out in the discussion? The visualized data gives a better explanation. In the end, the work focuses on what happened after the lift of the policy in recent years and a common low birth rate among countries.
Motivation
As an only child born and raised in China, I grew up with the existence of One-Child Policy and saw its changes over the years. I consider it as something that shapes my family relationships, and I have heard quite a few anecdotes like whose mom went to HK or abroad to give births as I was brought up. It has always been something that people give silent consent for, yet there’s so much that I don’t know about it, like how it came into being and what impacts it had on women’s bodies and the nation. Meanwhile, it has been oftentimes praised or criticized as a single historical event instead of being placed in a larger context, and many misinterpretations have been left unattained since the lift of the policy in 2016. Thus, inspired by an article that I read in my freshman year, Population, Policy, and Politics: How Will History Judge China’s One-Child Policy? by Feng et al., I decided to create a data visualization that compares China with other countries to understand it in a larger context.
When I was applying to NYU Shanghai, I wrote about the experience of being asked about China’s One-Child Policy while I didn’t know what to say about it. I didn’t expect that 2 years after I would be doing this project, and it feels right.
The project can be seen as a tribute to my childhood and my family.
Data Resources
United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs: Population Dynamics
Methodology
The project is presented through an interactive website, with data vizzies created on Tableau. The x-axis represents the fertility rate (The birth rate is the number of live births per thousand of population per year.), while the y-axis represents the birth rate (the average number of children a woman would have if she lived to the end of her childbearing years). The radius of circles represents the sex ratio at birth, meaning the ratio of female and male births. By comparing the index of ten countries similar in populations, birth rates, and cultural norms, the project hopes to answer questions including whether China’s One-Child Policy was necessary, the truth behind an unbalanced sex ratio at birth, and what are the common trends in birth rates among developing countries today.
What I Learned
Most research findings can be found on the project website, while a general thing that I have most benefited from the project is that I learned to appreciate things in a more critical yet inclusive way. Now I would never have my ideas fixed because of one single article or news report that I read, but rather I would take the initiative to collect primary sources and understand one thing from different angles. Through the making of data visualizations, I came to realize one thing, something that has been praised so highly can be average if placed on a larger time span, and something long criticized can be universal if compared with other countries.
When having office hours with Shindy and John Henry, I learned to examine my work as a general audience. What has been processed in my mind for a dozen of times (like the concept of sex ratio) may be very new to my audience, and it is of necessity to keep the definition of certain terms in data in the mind of the audience. We also discussed whether the natural sex ratio should be 50 50 or something different, which really struck me because I then realized that I may have imposed a wrong common sense to my audience as I missed certain steps in my research and jumped right in the conclusion. These details are all greatly important to a good visualization.
Questions remaining
Since the making of the project was on a tight schedule (2-3 weeks in total), I didn’t have enough time to explore more data visualization tools other than Tableau. I still wonder what a proper working pipeline for professional data journalists and infographic designers, which would definitely be helpful in my future work.
Next Steps
In the office hour with two Professors, we discussed other possibilities to approach the projects like using box plots to visualize the data. My next step would be trying out other visualization methods. I’m thinking about making a vizzie of what countries persisted while what countries shifted back and forth in making family planning policies over the years. Another idea emerged when I was looking at my propaganda poster wall. The colors, text, and even typefaces of the posters can also be visualized to present a historical trend & the attitudes of different governments.