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One Child Policy in China

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China is a land that contains an overpopulation crisis. With a current estimated 1.4billion people living in China, something needed to be done in order to lower the birth rates and control the fast growing population. The solution the Chinese government came up with was the one child policy. They set up a number penalties and benefits in order to encourage the Chinese people to cooperate with this policy. The predicted outcome was to reduce the birth rates and reduce their population, which was ultimately affecting the Chinese economy. However, the one child policy created an unexpected crisis of its own, the creation of unequal demographics of gender and the start of a new cultural and economic trend. This paper is going to study the …show more content…

While it is a true that the one child policy has reduced the birth rate dramatically since its enactment in 1979, the sex ratio between boys and girls have also change where more boys are being born than girls. According to China's 2000 census, there were 14 million births from November 1999 to November 2000, with a sex ratio of 116.9. China's birth sex ratio has been increasing for the past twenty years: the sex ratio at birth was 108.5 in 1981, 111.3 in 1989, and it fluctuated from 115.6 to 118.7 between 1994 and 1995. (Boer, Hudson pg 31)

Boys are viewed as such a high commodity that women in China are taking extreme measures to guarantee themselves a male. From the use of selective abortions to the abandonment of young girls, new technology is helping them eliminate their unwanted female fetus. "Because of the Communist government's brutal 25-year-old one-child policy, and since boys are considered more valuable than girls--as they carry on the family name and are expected to care for aging parents--ultrasound machines are employed to determine the sex of the baby. Then, if the baby is a girl, abort her." (Bauer pg16) For those families, who cannot afford to have this new technology, they resort to other drastic measures by abandoning the newborn daughter. With these methods, girls are being terminated and becoming limited while boys are thriving and becoming an excess in present day China. Thus creating a

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