China’s one child policy: The policy that changed the world

23 Déc China’s one child policy: The policy that changed the world

India is a country with a booming technology industry, one that relies on young people. There is fear that, by restricting the number of children that can be born, there will not be enough educated young people in the next generation to carry on India’s technological revolution. A child limit was already attempted in India however it didn’t take and was difficult to enforce. The child limit would not work in India as it did in China because it is a much more democratic country.

For China, and the world as a whole, the one child policy was one of the most important social policies ever implemented. “Considering the societal shifts, including the significant reduction in gender disparities as women’s lives have become increasingly similar to those of men, this trend is unlikely to reverse,” says Mr Dyson. We now turn to the evidence in support of each of these possibilities in the context of the one child family in India. Third, responses to fertility preferences and contraceptive use remain subject to measurement error, particularly since the interview setting often precludes privacy. However, a brief analysis of fertility preferences of women who have stopped at one child is instructive. About 73% of mothers with a single child said they did not want more children; 22% were sterilized.

Although economic constraints lie at the heart of our arguments regarding low fertility in India, these are constraints posed by growth rather than scarcity. As previous sections have tried to demonstrate, our one and two child families are less economically constrained than larger families because of their largely urban, educated and upper income situation12. What would lead these upper income households to limit fertility under conditions of economic growth?

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Because of this new belief, the population would be likely to keep declining, which could have tragic repercussions for China in the coming decades. What all this suggests is that this very low fertility is largely an expression of the same (although stronger) motives for fertility decline in general. In turn, these motivations are related to rising parental aspirations for children and for their own consequent social mobility (analogous to explanations for fertility decline in the 1970s and 1980s in China – Greenhalgh 1988).

Learning from China’s mistakes

Despite having a two-child policy amendment in place, India must improve its ongoing steps to make this policy more stringent by factoring in all the challenges. In addition, the Indian Government should make people aware of the rampant repercussions of an increasing population, rather than forcing the bill on the people. “There is a need to control the population for the development of the country, irrespective of whether it is the population of Hindus or Muslims or other religions,” said the Minister of State of Social Justice and Empowerment, whose Republican Party of India is part of the NDA government at the Centre.

Potential social problems & “little emperor” phenomenon

“Robust investments in prevention, palliative care, and social infrastructure are urgently needed to look after the ageing,” says Mr Goli. Urbanisation, migration, and changing labour markets are further eroding traditional family support – India’s strong point – leaving more elderly people behind. This exercise will redraw electoral boundaries to reflect population shifts, likely reducing parliamentary seats for the economically prosperous southern states. As federal revenues are allocated based on state populations, many fear this could deepen their financial struggles and limit policy-making freedom. With nearly 1.45 billion people now, you’d think the country would be quiet about having more children.

Characteristics of One-Child Families

As a superpower, China is interested in facilitating birth amongst a chosen few; while India continues with its ambivalent posture on the domestic use of in-vitro fertilization and other reproductive technologies, prohibiting the transnational traffic of ‘unsuitable foreigners’ and ‘nonheteronormative families’ to avail of the same. Most importantly, by aggressively participating in regulating the use of these technologies, the Indian and Chinese states are also keenly redefining the intimate lives of their citizenry. This is seen most pointedly in the recent change in the shifts in the one-child policy of the Chinese state, and the newly drafted Indian Surrogacy Bill. In the late 20th century, both countries woke up to the need to manage the fallout of their population policies.

• The prevalence of nuclear families among households with one, two, or more children is about 50% in our sample.
• But you’ve probably noticed it already, if not in your own or extended family, then in your neighbourhood, among your former batchmates and current colleagues.
• At other times, the single-child family is a subject of interest for countries with very low fertility.
• Dharini and Kunal Turakhia are careful to ensure that their only son, Dev, 11, spends time with his cousins, benefiting from the company while still having his parents all to himself.

Although China’s fertility rate plummeted faster than anywhere else in the world during the 1970s under these restrictions, the Chinese government thought it was still too high, influenced by the global debate over a possible overpopulation crisis suggested by organizations such as the Club of Rome and the Sierra Club. Factual evidence has shown that a child limit greatly reduces the fertility rate, the unemployment rate, and is healthy for the planet. Requiring a child limit is usually successful in lowering the fertility rate but is also controversial and hard to mandate (especially when other strategies to lower the population exist). Despite the obstacles, one can conclude that a child limit is necessary in eliminating the issue of overpopulation in India.

Investing in the child’s education

This is a nationally representative sample of 41,554 households and interviews with 33,583 ever-married women aged 15–49. The sample is spread over 1503 villages and 971 urban blocks in 33 states and union territories. Unlike the National Family Health Surveys, the IHDS is not primarily a fertility survey but contains extensive data on income, employment, structure of family life and investments in children, allowing us to test some arguments about differences in family lifestyles in families with different fertility patterns. At the same time, deeper analysis of fertility and mortality statistics from IHDS compare well with NFHS-III conducted around the same time (Desai et al. 2010). The value of education is particularly high among the Bengali speaking populations of West Bengal and parts of Assam.

Table 1 based on fertility estimates from the 2001 and 2011 censuses clearly establishes that 9 out of 35 states and Union Territories have TFRs below 2 (Guilmoto and Rajan 2013); however, this does not distinguish between period and cohort fertility. Hence, we examine several different sources of data to see if there is any evidence of an emerging trend towards families with a single child. By the late 1980s, economic costs and incentives created by the contract system were already reducing the number of children farmers wanted. Despite declining birth rates, some politicians have advocated for the adoption of something like China’s former one-child policy in northern states with large Muslim populations. These calls have less to do with demographic reality, and more to do with majoritarian Hindu nationalist concerns around Muslim and “lower-caste” fertility. Despite declining birth rates, some politicians have advocated for the adoption of something like China’s former one-child policy in northern states with large Muslim populations.

While countries like France and Sweden took 120 and 80 years respectively to double their aging population from 7% to 14%, India is expected to reach this milestone in just 28 years, says Mr Goli. The Indian population is increasing exponentially and will continue to multiply in the coming years. This is the higher ratio of people of married age one child policy in india who will give birth to children. The state of Assam and Uttar Pradesh in India has adopted the two-child policy to control the rampantly increasing population.

• Hence, we try to establish the wantedness of the one child family by asking a series of questions about its bio-demographic and social correlates.
• Tim Dyson, a demographer at the London School of Economics, told the BBC that after a decade or two, continuing “very low levels of fertility will lead to rapid population decline”.
• Despite the obstacles, a child limit could be a reality with the use of enough resources.
• If we find that a small but significant proportion of the Indian population has always had a tendency to very low fertility, then our observation is not a sign of future trends in this family type but instead evidence of greater population heterogeneity than is expected for developing countries.

An interesting ethical question is, if it is allowed and desirable to limit human rights (sexual and reproductive rights) to promote decent life and economic development. China decided 32 years ago to implement a rigorous family-planning policy and they will still be affected by this decision during the coming years. The policy first enhanced economic growth through a lower dependency ratio, which even led to the opening of a demographic window. But the accelerated ageing of the population yields an increasing old dependency ratio. China has already undergone major changes and addressed challenges with drastic answers- the One Child Policy is one example.

In this case, will it be because the latter lacks the ambition for dreaming big dreams and is also hampered by cultural and institutional constraints on such dramatic fertility decline? Data from the Health Ministry’s most recent National Family Health Survey, released last week, showed India’s total fertility rate had dropped to 2.0, below the so-called replacement rate of 2.1 needed to maintain a stable population. As in China, in some states in India, women’s education and their aspirations for their children have contributed to lower birth rates. Birth rates in other states with high Muslim populations have also declined, but at a slower rate.

Both are more likely to invest in children’s education than larger families but parents of a single child are even more invested in this child than families with two children. This suggests that one need not look for the emergence of post-modern aspirations and ideologies for below-replacement families in countries like India. The motives underlying the first demographic transition do not respect the arbitrary floor of a TFR of 2 that demographers have set up. The continuing global decline in fertility in the 21st century has led to mixed reactions.

But a rate of 1.6 or lower could trigger “rapid, unmanageable population decline”. In this paper we consistently show predicted values from multiple regression or logistic regression for outcomes of interest. These regressions control for woman’s age, education, place of residence, caste, household income and a dummy indicator for the state of residence. The results are predicted using STATA MARGINS command, holding all other variables at their mean value separately for urban and rural residents.

In both countries, skewed sex ratios caused by sex selective abortions have led to a range of social problems, including forced marriages and human trafficking. In the 1960s and 1970s, neo‐​Malthusian panic about overpopulation overtook eugenics as the primary motivation behind coercive policies aimed at limiting childbearing. Neo‐​Malthusian ideas spread among senior technocrats and government leaders in some developing countries, resulting in human rights abuses that Western development professionals encouraged and that Western aid often funded. Those abuses peaked in the form of China’s one‐​child policy (1979–2015) and India’s forced sterilizations during its “Emergency” (1975–77), a period in India when civil liberties were suspended and the prime minister ruled by decree. The one‐​child policy saw over 300 million Chinese women fitted with intrauterine devices modified to be irremovable without surgery, over 100 million sterilizations, and over 300 million abortions.