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Unintended Consequences Of China 's One Child Policy

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The Unintended Consequences of China’s OCP The freedom that Americans have to raise their children according to their beliefs starkly contradicts the one-child policy implemented in China. The one-child policy was a program designed to restrict Chinese families to only one child, with severe consequences lined up for those who disobeyed. It was met with harsh opposition, from Chinese citizens as well as from other countries. The policy succeeded in creating smaller families, but it unleashed a slew of unintended consequences, including a higher crime rate and an increase in the elderly population, who only have one child to support them. Most significantly, the policy caused a national “gendercide” and an influx of Chinese bachelors, indirectly causing an increase in sex trafficking in and around the country. Did the one-child policy achieve its intended effect, or did it cause many more inadvertent effects that it could not control? The one-child policy was implemented in 1979 by the Chinese government (The Economist 3). Its original goal was to restrain the population growth from its expected goal of 1.4 billion to a maximum of 1.2 billion by the end of the century (Kane and Choi 992). The policy was created with little regard to the potential demographic or societal changes, but rather was a political and economic measure to control the abnormally high population growth (Feng et al. 84). China’s population was rapidly growing, but there was a severe shortage of natural

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