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Essay On China's One Child Policy

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China’s one-child policy made it illegal for most Chinese couples to have more than one child. It was the culmination of the government’s long struggle to control population growth. The policy was enforced mainly through financial incentives and punishments, but in rural areas brutal enforcement techniques like non-consensual sterilization and abortion were sometimes used. While the policy did reduce the population, it also caused problems such as an unbalanced male-female sex ratio and “4:2:1 families.” The one-child policy shows that women in Communist China remained in a position of social and political inferiority. As Communists in China attempted to attract popular support in order to gain political power, they made promises to women …show more content…

Rural women struggled under the double burden of both work and child rearing (Roberts, 1999). And, infamously, the one-child family policy, which required most Chinese families to have only a single child, robbed women of any control over their own bodies. This paper will recount the history of the Chinese government’s struggle with its growing population, culminating in the one-child policy, describe the goals and enforcement methods of the policy itself, examine the effectiveness of the policy, outline the government’s shift to its new, current two-child policy, and argue that the one-child policy shows the continuation of female repression in China, despite the Communists’ promises. The Chinese government’s long struggle to control the growth China’s large population began in the 1950s. The 1953 census showed that the population was growing extremely rapidly, and researchers estimated that the population would reach 1.4 billion by the year 2000 (Roberts, 1999). With food shortages already becoming a concern, the government was afraid that the cost of feeding, housing, and providing for such enormous population would harm the economy (Roberts, 1998). As a result, a propaganda campaign encouraging the use of birth control was introduced as an effort to slow growth (Roberts, 1999). However, in 1958 the Great Leap Forward, Mao

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