preview

The One Child Policy and Gender Inequality

Best Essays

Given the high sex ratio in recent China population report, the abnormally excessive male birth exemplifies the persistence of son preference on women’s fertility behavior. Son preference rooted in Chinese agriculture-based economy and historical feudalism, in consistence with the reliance on laborers and continuing the family line. Older people prefer to depend on their sons to get financial and physical support, while daughters are regarded as property of their husband’s family since the day of marriage.
However, the wish of having multiple children, especially boys, was challenged by the strict One Child policy in 1979. The One Child policy, also known as Family Planning policy, was implemented across the country as one of fundamental …show more content…

The variables are having siblings or not, siblings’ age and gender, to figure out if the siblings distracted parents’ attention and investment.
Key Finding
Although, the first two articles written by Li and Cooney (1993), Merli and Smith (2000) began with a similar question on people’s acceptance to One Child policy , ultimately they obtained two contrary conclusions. In accordance with the demographic survey, Li and Conney (1993) concluded that the One Child policy did not remove the discrimination completely, son preference still existed and expanded in many other shapes, for example, some women checked the sex of fetuses by ultrasound and used abortion as a backup method to prevent from the wasting of birth quota if the fetus is female (Kristof 1993). In addition, the regional developmental level and family socioeconomic conditions which were initially taken in proportion to the compliance degree of One Child policy have found negligible and irrelevant. Specifically, it turned out son preference rooted in not only those families with low income and education, but also privileged families holding wealth and highly educated. This opinion, whereas, was opposed with Merli and Smith’s second report in 2000 which insisted the undeniable contribution of regional development and governmental

Get Access