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Essay On China's One Child Policy

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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

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