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Improving China 's Development Policy

Decent Essays

Improving China’s development policy has a personal urgency for me. For the past twenty-two years, my mother has worked in the municipal Department of Family Planning where she enforced the One-Child Policy, an effort to “create the best population structure for China’s national development.” The gap between China’s needs and the policy tools I saw used to meet those needs sparked my passion for transforming the system.
As an official, my mother often had to penalize “excessive pregnancies.” I vividly recall the time a desperate woman implored my mother not to order the abortion of her child, but she refused because of the law. Even knowing my mother would be punished if she had acted differently, I was shocked by this system’s cruelty to women. Occasionally, some of these “illegal” women managed to escape from forcible abortions at a price of their children becoming the undocumented “blacklist overborn population” and thus being deprived of the entitlements to social services. During my childhood in a rural village, I acquainted with several such kids who could not receive public education just because their parents failed to obey the civil duty of “one child a couple.” Every time I asked my mother why they were not invited to school and her answer was always “they were born illegal,” I would be sorry for my friends and more doubtful of the policy. My belief in the national development goal of securing the happiness of the people was since challenged. I felt compelled to

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