China’s One-Child Policy Wasn’t Worth Keeping China’s One-Child Policy was an attempt to handle China’s ever-growing population, which seemed like it would soon outgrow China’s economy and food production. In fact, it did just that in 1959 when a catastrophic famine struck China and caused the death of millions of Chinese due to Mao Zedong’s “Great Leap Forward” plan that was intended to modernize China’s economy. Following this, the Chinese government started to push further and further for strict family planning and even “began stepping up family planning campaigns, and by the mid-1970s it introduced the family planning slogan ‘Late, Long and Few’” (Connet). All this culminated in the official integration of the One-Child Policy in …show more content…
In addition, during the time that the policy was in effect hundreds of millions Chinese were forced to pay fines that sometimes exceeded several years’ worth of income if they failed to conform to the policy’s strict restrictions, or had unauthorized children. Not only that but in order to enforce the policy, a quota reward system was implemented for Planning Officials by the Chinese government. Furthermore, if these quotas were not met, Planning Officials would be forced to either pay absurd fines or be stripped of any promotions they may have had as well as mark them as unable to receive any in the future. Worse still, the way these quotas were fulfilled was to “encourage” women to abort any unwanted children, usually by way of threatening their jobs, being fined a ridiculous amount, and not unusually with the possibility of physical harm. Despite all this, some women stood their ground, only to be restrained and arrested by officials, then subjected to forced abortions. These acts were not at all uncommon and an estimated 336 million forced abortions have taken place in China. This led to staggering suicide rates among women, with fifty-five percent of all women's suicides occurring in China, despite only having
The policy was not evenly reenforced and charged widely varying fines for unplanned births. Laura Fitzpatrick says in her article, “Reports of forced abortions or sterilizations are common,” (Doc E). The way the One-Child Policy was enforced was horrible, and many people suffered unnecessarily. In Mei Fong’s book, Huang Denggao says, “If the couple is too poor to pay, we’ll take things from their house.” Families that had just welcomed new children into the world would have their bikes or televisions taken away, causing even more stress and suffering.
China’s One-Child Policy was a bad decision because it disrupted the traditional family ratio, disturbed the balance of the economy, and had drastic social costs for
Imagine you want a big family. It's a huge dream of yours. But you can't because the government decided you can only have one child. Well, that was the situation in China. China created a one-child policy in 1980 to try and decrease their wildly growing population.
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.
One important idea form the article is that one child policy did has a positive effect on China’s future economic growth. Pei-Ju Liao writes, “The results suggest that introducing the one-child policy promotes the accumulation of human capital and increases per capita output”. I totally agree with her point. In China, Mao Zedong, the Chairman of the Communist Party of China 1949-76, believed that "there’s strength in number ”, one way that empowers the country is the growth of population. They even come up with a medal called “hero mother” to encourage women to have more babies. This strategy significantly increased the Chinese population. The population almost doubled from 541.67 million to 962.59 million between 1949 and 1978. During this period, one woman had about 6 children on an average. Finally, this gradually decreased due to natural causes. Parents used to
In 1979, China decided to establish a one child policy which states that couples are only allowed to have one child, unless they meet certain exceptions[1].In order to understand what social impacts the one child policy has created in China it important to evaluate the history of this law. China’s decision to implement a Child policy has caused possible corruption, an abuse of women’s rights, has led to high rates of female feticide, has created a gender ratio problem for China, and has led to specific problems associated with both the elderly and younger generation. Finally, an assessment of why China’s one child policy is important to the United States allows for a full evaluation of the policy.
The world’s most populated country, occupying a population approaching one and a half billion and contributing to approximately twenty percent of the worldwide population. A country named the People's Republic of China. During the late 1970’s, the overgrowing population of China was reaching one billion, causing problems for the society and government. Chinese citizens were living in extreme poverty and starvation. As a means to rectify these issues, the Chinese government introduced the One Child Policy. This regulation permits couples to have one, and only one child in order to diminish the extremely populated country. The One Child Policy is incredibly controversial, in comparison to many government law and regulation affecting moral and
In the mid-1980's, according to Chinese government statistics, birth control surgeries such as abortions, sterilizations, and IUD insertions, were running at a rate of 30 million a year. (Mosher 50) Numbers for more recent years are unavailable; the Chinese government, embarrassed by reports of coercion and female infanticide, has refused to release them. Many, if not most, of these operations are performed on women whose "consent" has been wrung out of them by threats and punishments. (Mosher 50) When questions are asked of the whereabouts of the 1.7 million female babies that fail to show up in birth statistics each year, there are disturbing explanations. (Richards 6)
The final reason that the one-child policy was a bad idea is because of the fact that China’s fertility rate was already decreasing and was one of the lowest rates compared to Brazil, South Korea, and Thailand in 1979 making the policy pointless and unnecessary. “The claim by the Chinese officials that the one child policy has helped avert over 400 million births simply cannot be substantiated by
Even though it fights to solve a social problem, overpopulation, it violates several rights in order to accomplish this one goal. Although overpopulation is the main reason for this policy, there are alternatives such as educating people about overpopulation and how it affects the country. Due to this law, women suffer through procedures that go against their personal beliefs. This law has also broken up families because most men would prefer having a son than a daughter, causing emotional stress on the mother. China’s one-child policy violates human rights because it is forcing
There has been a long history of China’s one child policy, since it was first introduces in 1979 by a Chinese Leader Deng Xiaoping (Rosenberg n.p). The law was meant to be temporary and used to control the population; however it is still in use today (Rosenberg n.p). When the policy was first enforced, it only
In 1979, Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping introduced the one child policy. This was part of the family planning policy to help control China’s growing population. This policy limited a couple, of a man and a woman, to only one child. Fines, pressures to abort a pregnancy, forced sterilization accompanied second or unwanted pregnancies. Although many think the one child policy was a law, it surprisingly was not. It was a policy enforced by the system of punishments. The punishments of disregarding the policy included being fined a great deal of money, demotion, and discharge from work. China’s government was inhumane in enforcing the policy.
The purpose was to limit the great majority of family units in the country to only having one child per family. China began promoting birth control and family planning with the establishment of the People’s Republic in 1949. By the time that this policy was stating China had almost reached its one-billion mark. First born children were often favored to be a boy. This is because the son would inherit the land and family name when the father died. This resulted in the rise of abortions for female fetuses. Efforts were made to families with a handicapped first born child. The government was allowing those families to have more than one child. Also families that had a girl for a first born were allowed to have another child. If the parents were both didn’t have siblings they were also allowed to have more than one child. Late into 2015, the Chinese government decided to put raise the one child policy to two children per family that took effect in
Since 1980, China has made its people the subject of an intrusive and unfair, One Child Policy. This policy was the result of Chinese officials becoming worried of the countries jump in population from 1960 to 1980 causing a widespread lack of resources, so they decided to induct a law that would make force Chinese citizens to be limited to one child. Because of this controversial policy the question has been raised, did the one child policy positively or negatively effect China? The one child policy did negatively effect China and its people, because it resulted in gender discrimination, unjust punishments and was unnecessary due to the already declining fertility rate.
“China Will Have another Major Demographic Problem,” is an article on About.com written by Matt Rosernberg. It explains the great imbalance between man and women due to China’s One Child Policy, and how this situation will disturb the stability and development of China because the high numbers of bachelors tend to damage community by doing crimes and violence. The policy says that a couple could only have a child. This was created as a temporary solution since China was overpopulated by 972 million people in 1979 (Rosenberg). Through years this policy is proven to reduce the population growth. However, there have been some unintended side effects. Not only did this policy create the gender imbalance, but also many other issues, such as: the high population of unmarried men, human trafficking, and the high rate of suicide.