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China - The Epicenter of Overpopulation Essay example

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China - The Epicenter of Overpopulation

In 1999 the world population reached six billion. Roughly 200,000 lives have been added each day since then, about one small city a week. This population boom however, is not evenly distributed throughout the globe. In fact, many countries in Europe have experienced negative population growth in the last ten years. It is the developing nations of our world that are most responsible for the exponential increase the world has begun to experience. The busy-bodied human mind has rushed and hurried to find "tech-fix's" to sustain our ever growing population. The population should have hit a glass ceiling a few billion people ago, many argue that it has explaining the 1-2 billion people dying of …show more content…

The population was further pushed when communist party leader Mao Zedong encouraged everyone to have as many children as possible. At this time, China was relatively weak and did not have much equipment in their military force, but Mao assured them that in the case of a possible war with Japan (which never happened) they would have numbers. In 1979 leader Deng Xiaoping recognized the disaster that China's population had become and implemented the one child policy.

The one child policy in China stated that each couple would be allowed to have one child. The intention was that the birth rate would be immediately lowered and the population growth would slow. Cadres were spread throughout the country to regulate birth rates in the many rural villages and throughout the cities. There were exceptions to the policy; if the first born child of a couple was a girl, they were allowed to try for a boy. Additionally if two people remarried and had children from previous marriages they were allowed to have another child. In '93 China reported to the world that they had met their 10 year population quota. This shocked the world and investigations began on how the PRC could regulate population growth to the extent that they did. Slowly truths emerged about the alarming rates of abortion and sterilization.

Today, abortion and sterilization are not as nearly wide spread and infanticide is relatively low.

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