One-child policy

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Poster of Chinese birth control policy under the slogan "Sweet Achievement."

The Planned Birth policy (Simplified Chinese: 计划生育; pinyin: jìhuà shēngyù) is the birth control policy of the government of the People's Republic of China (PRC). It is known in Western society as the One-child Policy due to the required payment of a "social compensation fee" for couples having more than one child in an urban area. China's generally perceived pandemic overpopulation problem, with the associated social and environmental problems, forced the government to take strong unique measures in population planning policy. The policy is controversial both within and outside China due to allegations of extreme methods such as forced abortions and other human rights abuses by the local authorities. Punishments may include amputation of genitals and forced sterilization.

[edit] Overview

Additional children will result in large fines. The families are required to pay economic penalties, and might be denied bonuses at their workplace. Children born in overseas countries are not counted into the policy if they do not obtain Chinese citizenship. Chinese returned from overseas can have a second child.^[1]

The Danshan, Sichuan Province Nonguang Village Public Affairs Bulletin Board in September 2005 noted that RMB 25,000 in social compensation fees were owed in 2005. Thus far 11,500 RMB had been collected leaving another 13,500 RMB to be collected.

The social fostering or maintenance fee (Simplified Chinese: 社会抚养费; pinyin: shèhuì fúyǎng fèi) sometimes called in the West a family planning fine, is collected as a multiple of either the annual disposable income of city dwellers or the annual cash income of peasants as determined each year by the local statistics office. The fine for a child born above the birth quota that year is thus a multiple of, depending upon the locality, either urban resident disposable income or peasant cash income estimated that year by the local statistics. So a fine for a child born ten years ago is based about the income estimate for the year of the child's birth and not of the current year.^[2] They also have to pay for both the children to go to school and all the family's health care. Some children who are in one-child families pay less than the children in other families. The one child policy was designed from the outset to be a one generation policy.^[3] The one-child policy is now enforced at the provincial level, and enforcement varies; some provinces have relaxed the restrictions. Some provinces and cities such as Beijing permit two "only child" parents to have two children. Henan province, with a population of about 100 million, does not allow this exception.

Moreover, in accordance with PRC's affirmative action policies towards ethnic minorities, all non-Han ethnic groups are subjected to different rules and are usually allowed to have two children in urban areas, and three or four in rural areas; in addition, some couples simply pay a fine, or "social maintenance fee" to have more children.^[4] Thus the overall fertility rate of mainland China is, in fact, closer to two children per family than to one child per family (1.8). The steepest drop in fertility occurred in the 1970s before one child per family was implemented in 1979. This is due to the fact that population policies and campaigns have been ongoing in China since the 1950s. During the 1970s, a campaign of 'One is good, two is OK and three is too many' was heavily promoted.

Recently, the policy has changed because the long period of sub-replacement fertility caused population aging and negative population growth in some areas,^[5] and improvements in education and the economy have caused more couples to become reluctant to have children.

In April 2007 a study by the University of California Irvine, which claimed to be the first systematic study of the policy, found that it had proved "remarkably effective".^[6]

[edit] Background

On the 16th of September 1949, Mao Zedong proclaimed that hunger and mass starvation were the products of feudalism and capitalist exploitation and hence were things of the past.^[7] This was however to be followed by a series of U-turns. In 1954, alarmed by the unexpectedely high rise in population shown by the census, propaganda in favor of birth control was launched. In 1958 it was believed that the Great Leap Forward would make concerns over population irrelevant. Academics, such as the President of Beijing University of the time, were attacked as Malthusians^[8]. Mao believed in the idea of self-sufficiency, and hoped that policies including the Great Leap Forward (which ended in a terrible man-made famine) would strengthen China. The failure of the Great Leap was partly blamed on Mao's idea of "the more people, the stronger we are" ^{[citation needed]}, and the rampant overpopulation which resulted. Uneducated families were told to have as many children as possible.

In 1962 in the wake of the Great Leap Forward a Birth Control Campaign was launched. This in turn fell afoul of the Cultural Revolution during which birth control was denounced as a bourgeois concept.^[9] As the Cultural revolution ebbed, birth control again received official backing. Zhou Enlai declared that "one child is ideal, two are enough, three are too many". However in the late 70s it became clear that the two large cohorts of children from the time of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution meant that keeping family size down to 2 children was inadequate. As these children grew into adults of a fertile age, China was faced by a population growth that threatened its progress.^[10] Even a steadily expanding food supply could not be expected to keep pace with such a rise.^[11]

When Deng Xiaoping took power in 1978, his new policies focused on strengthening China's economy. China was the world's most populous nation by far, and he saw overpopulation as a roadblock to economic development. In 1979, Deng began the national initiative of "birth planning", encouraging families to have only one child to control the population. The policy was not legally enforced nationally, only "encouraged"; supervision was usually at the Township-Level. Every township and town had a "Birth Planning Commission", headed by a Commissioner.

[edit] Fertility rate reduction

The fertility rate has fallen to 1.7 births per woman, a sub-replacement fertility rate (compared to 2.2 in the United States).^[12] Such a reduction in fertility reduced the severity of problems that come with overpopulation, like epidemics, slums, overwhelmed social services (health, education, law enforcement, and more), and strain on the ecosystem from abuse of fertile land and production of high volumes of waste.

Chinese population and fertility data is a notoriously murky subject since there are great political pressures to come up with the "right" answer. Estimates of current overall Chinese fertility (the average number of children a woman has over a lifetime) vary over a wide range from 1.3 (which is based on the national Census)[3] by some scholar to 1.6 officially(adjusted figure from the national Census) to a high of 1.9 (World Bank) or even somewhere around 2.0 (Liang Zhongtang of the Shaanxi Province Economic Research Center). A 1999 article in Population Research, China's flagship demographic journal, stated that China's total fertility rate is probably somewhere between 1.8 and 2.0.^[13]

Studies by Chinese demographers, funded in part by the UN Fund for Population Activities, showed that combining poverty alleviation and health care with relaxed targets for family planning was more effective at reducing fertility than vigorous enforcement of very ambitious fertility reduction targets.^[14] In 1988, Zeng Yi expounded upon the effect of the transformation to the market on Chinese fertility in an article co-authored with Yale University Professor T. Paul Schultz in the PRC journal Social Sciences in China [Zhongguo Shehui Kexue, January 1988]. The introduction of the contract responsibility system in agriculture during the early 1980s weakened family planning controls during that period. However, by the late 1980s, economic costs and incentives created by the contract system were already reducing the number of children farmers wanted. Zeng points out that the "big cooking pot" system of the Peoples' Communes had insulated people from the costs of having many children.

[edit] Criticism

The OCPF policy has been criticized by human rights advocacy groups, and especially Western religious advocacy groups. They generally consider that the one-child policy is against human rights of reproduction. The one-child policy has also been criticised by pro-life advocates and some evangelical Christians. Inside China, criticisms generally focus on the potential social problems such as the "One-Two-Four" or "little emperor" problem, while recognizing the importance of having such a policy for the country. Related to this criticism are certain side-consequences that are sometimes attributed to the one-child policy, including the use of sex-selective abortion, as reflected in highly skewed male-female ratios at birth.

A second type of criticism has come from those who acknowledge the challenges stemming from China's high population growth but view the OCPF as only one of a set of alternative policies that could have achieved the same reduced fertility and population growth over a more extended period of time without some of the negative side-effects of the OCPF as it was implemented. Susan Greenhalgh's (2003) recent review of the policy-making process behind the adoption of the OCPF shows that some of these alternatives were known but not fully considered.^[15]

A third type of criticism concerns exaggerated claimed effects of the policy on the reduction in the total fertility rate. As Hasketh, Lu, and Xing observe: "However, the policy itself is probably only partially responsible for the reduction in the total fertility rate. The most dramatic decrease in the rate actually occurred before the policy was imposed. Between 1970 and 1979, the largely voluntary "late, long, few" policy, which called for later childbearing, greater spacing between children, and fewer children, had already resulted in a halving of the total fertility rate, from 5.9 to 2.9. After the one-child policy was introduced, there was a more gradual fall in the rate until 1995, and it has more or less stabilized at approximately 1.7 since then."^[16] These researchers note further that China could have expected a continued reduction in its fertility rate just from continued economic development had it kept to the previous policy. For comparison, both India and China had total fertility rates (TFR's) of about 6 in 1950. India's TFR dropped much more slowly than China's before 1990, to about 4.0, and is now 2.7.[4] [5]

[edit] Human rights

The one-child policy is criticized as violating basic human rights. Many of its critics^[Who?] are concerned with the practices allegedly used to implement this policy. China has been accused of meeting its population requirements through bribery, coercion, forced sterilization, forced abortion, and infanticide, with most reports coming from rural areas.

In 1998, Gao Xiao Duan, a former Chinese population control administrator, testified before a United States House subcommittee regarding her participation in forced sterilizations and abortions.^[17] A report in 2001 exposed in Guangdong a quota of 20,000 abortions and sterilisations was set for Huaiji County in the same year (2001) due to reported disregard of the one-child policy. The effort included using portable ultrasound devices to identify abortion candidates in remote villages. Early reports show that women as far along as 8.5 months pregnant were forced to abort by injection of saline solution into the womb. ^[18]

U.S. President George W. Bush claimed these abuses as his reason for stopping the US$40 million payment to the United Nations Fund for Population Activities (UNFPA) in early 2002. ^[19] In early 2003 the U.S. State Department issued a press release stating that they would not continue to support the UNFPA in its present form because the US government believed that, at the very least, coercive birth limitation practices were not being properly addressed. Furthermore, it is the U.S. government's view that the right to "found a family" is protected under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This, coupled with the International Conference on Population and Development's view that it is also the right of the individual, not the state, to determine the number of children, represents a clear conflict between China's policy and internationally accepted and adopted human rights conventions.^[20]

The use of forced sterilization and forced abortion are in contradiction with officially stated policies and views of China.^[21]

[edit] Gender-based birthrate disparity

The sex ratio at birth (between male and female births) in mainland China reached 117:100 in the year 2000, substantially higher than the natural baseline, which ranges between 103:100 and 107:100. It had risen from 108:100 in 1981 -- at the boundary of the natural baseline -- to 111:100 in 1990. [6] According to a report by the State Population and Family Planning Commission, there will be 30 million more men than women in 2020, potentially leading to social instability.^[22] The correlation between the increase of sex ratio disparity on birth and the deployment of one child policy would appear to have been caused by the one-child policy.

However, other Asian regions also have higher than average ratios, including Taiwan (110:100), and South Korea (108:100), which do not have a family planning policy.^[23] Many studies have explored the reason for the gender-based birthrate disparity in China as well as other countries. A study in 1990 attributed the high preponderance of reported male births in mainland China to four main causes: diseases which affect females more severely than males; the result of widespread under-reporting of female births;^[24] the illegal practice of sex-selective abortion made possible by the widespread availability of ultrasound; and finally, acts of child abandonment and infanticide. It can be argued that the predispositional preference of boys over girls has been amplified by the implementation of the policy.

In a recent paper, Emily Oster (2005) proposed a biological explanation for the gender imbalance in Asian countries, including China. Using data on viral prevalence by country as well as estimates of the effect of hepatitis on sex ratio, Oster claimed that Hepatitis B could account for up to 75% of the gender disparity in China.^[25]

However, Monica Das Gupta (2005) has shown that "whether or not females 'go missing' is determined by the existing sex composition of the family into which they are conceived. Girls with no older sisters have similar chances of survival as boys. However, girls conceived in families that already have a daughter experience steeply higher probabilities of being aborted or of dying in early childhood. Gupta claims that cultural factors provide the overwhelming explanation for the "missing" females."^[26]

The disparity in the sex ratio at birth increases dramatically after the first birth, for which the ratios remained steadily within the natural baseline over the 20 year interval between 1980 and 1999. Thus, a large majority of couples appear to accept the outcome of the first pregnancy, whether it is a boy or a girl. However, if the first child is a girl, and they are able to have a second child, then a couple may take extraordinary steps to assure that the second child is a boy. If a couple already has two or more boys, however, the sex ratio of higher parity births swings decidedly in a feminine direction.^[27]

This demographic evidence indicates that while families highly value having male offspring, a secondary norm of having a girl or having some balance in the sexes of children often comes into play. For example, Zeng Yi et al. (1993) reported a study based on the 1990 census in which they found sex ratios of just 65 or 70 boys per 100 girls for high parity births in families that already had two or more boys.^[28] A study by Barbara Anderson and Brian Silver (1995) found a similar pattern among both Han and non-Han nationalities in Xinjiang Province: a strong preference for girls in high parity births in families that had already borne two or more boys.^[29]

The commonly accepted explanation for son preference is that sons in rural families may be thought to be more helpful in farm work. Both rural and urban populations have economic and traditional incentives, including widespread remnants of Confucianism, to prefer sons over daughters. Sons are preferred as they provide the primary financial support for the parents in their retirement, and a son's parents typically are better cared for than his wife's. In addition, Chinese traditionally view that daughters, on their marriage, become primarily part of the groom's family. A woman used to change her surname to her husband's surname^{[citation needed]} or add her husband's surname before her surname after marriage. For some families, one's daughter-in-law's name instead of a daughter's name would be added in the book of family tree. Daughters traditionally could not inherit, either. Therefore, if a family had no son, the fortune of this family would be given to the husband's brothers or other male relatives after the husband's death. However, high sex ratios in the current population of China do not occur only in rural areas. Hasketh et al. (2005) show that the ratio is nearly identical in rural and urban areas.

[edit] Chinese demographers examine gender ratio problem in January 2006 review article

A review article "China’s birth Ratio at Birth: From Doubts About its Existence to Looking for a Solution"^[30] by the Editorial Board of China's lead demography journal, Population Research [Renkou Yanjiu] in its January 2006 issue argued that only an approach that makes the rights of women central can succeed in bringing down China's high gender ratio at birth and improve the survival rate of female infants and girls. The author of the section of the article from which the quotes below are drawn, "Research on the Sex Ratio at Birth Should Take a Gender Discrimination Approach" is Ci Qinying, Professor in the Demography Institute at East China Normal University in Shanghai.

• "If we do pay more attention to the problem of the rising sex ratio, still the focus is on the rights of males such as the right to marry, and ignores women’s rights such as the right to survive, the right to reproduce, the right to health, etc. This approach inflicts even more harm on women. If this approach is taken, women will never be able to escape their subsidiary position and their role of satisfying the desires of others. Robbing females of their right to exist [shengmingquan 生命权] is for the sake of giving birth to males – that is putting the right to survive of males first. Moreover, protecting women’s right to exist is merely for the purpose of provide a wife to sons. A measure to ensure that a counterpart is available to ensure that male can exercise his right to marry. In both case, the male is primary and the female is subsidiary."

• "Therefore, how a researcher approaches the question of the sex ratio at birth – from what point for view, considering whose rights – is critical. This depends upon the values of the researcher, the humanistic orientation of the researcher and the consciousness the researcher has about gender and gender discrimination. Protecting the right to exist, the right to reproduce, and the right to health of girls should be at the very core of policy and action measures to control sex ratio at birth. That is because females are the biggest victims of the rising sex ratio. The rising sex ratio is in fact robbing females of their right to exist and completely discriminates against females."

The review article argues that a human rights perspective is important.

• "Social controls on methods of selective reproduction are needed not only because of the higher birth ratio that results but also because selective reproduction harms the body and soul of the mother and robs unborn infants (regardless of being boy or girl) of their right to live. Selective reproduction itself should be more closely regulated and brought under control."

• "Even aside from the question of the rising sex ratio at birth, we should also intervene against and oppose elective abortion. Elective abortion robs unborn female infants of their right to live and their right to exist, accentuates the social custom of favoring males over females. Not only does it harm women’s bodies it also reduces women to the role of a mere tool for reproduction. Women bodies and spirits are suffering grievous wounds. Therefore no matter what the results of an elective abortion might be, we should intervene against and oppose elective abortion. The rise of the sex ratio at birth is only one among several reasons for intervening on selective reproduction."

While these views are not mainstream or government policy in China, that they could appear in the lead demography journal is intriguing.

The authors of another review article "Girl Survival in China: History, Present Situation and Prospects" presented at a 2005 conference supported by the United Nations Fund for Population Activities UNFPA concluded that "The Chinese government has already set the goal of achieving a normal gender ratio at birth by 2010, and to achieve preliminary results in establishing a new cultural outlook on marriage and having children. The government is working to change the system, way of thinking and other obstacles to attacking the root of the problem. Only if equality of males and females is strongly promoted ... will the harmonious and sustainable development of society be possible."^[31]

[edit] Abandoned or orphaned children and adoption

Rural Sichuan roadside sign: "It is forbidden to discriminate against, mistreat or abandon baby girls."

The social pressure exerted by the one-child policy has affected the rate at which parents abandon undesirable children, and many live in state-sponsored orphanages, from which thousands are adopted internationally and by Chinese parents each year. In the 1980s and early 1990s, poor care and high mortality rates in some state institutions generated intense international pressure for reform.^[32] In the years that followed, adoption rates climbed dramatically, increasing to the U.S. alone from about 200 in 1992 to more than 7,900 in 2005.^[33] According to Sten Johansson and Ola Nygren (1991) adoptions accounted for half of the so-called "missing girls" in the 1980s in the PRC.^[34] Through the 1980s, as the one-child policy came into force, parents who desired a son but bore a daughter in some cases failed to report or delayed the reporting of the birth of the girl to the authorities. But rather than neglecting or abandoning unwanted girls, the parents may have offered them up for formal or informal adoption. A majority of children who went through formal adoption in China in the later 1980s were girls, and the proportion who were girls increased over time (Johansson and Nygren 1991).

The practice of adopting out unwanted girls is consistent with both the son preference of many Chinese couples and the findings of Zeng Yi et al. (1993) and Anderson and Silver (1995) that under some circumstances families have a preference for girls, in particular when they have already satisfied their goals for sons. Recent research by Weiguo Zhang (2006) on child adoption in rural China also reveals increasing receptivity to adopting girls, including by infertile and childless couples.^[35]

[edit] Infanticide

It is unknown how common infanticide is in China, though government officials state that it is "rare". There are accounts of parents killing their female infants in remote and rural areas due to various reasons, including: the family is not able to support all their children; the parents do not want to be looked down on or laughed at by the community (a woman who did not give birth to a boy may be considered "not good at" birth); the wife wants to prevent the husband from marrying another woman/concubine in the excuse of her inability of giving birth to (enough) sons.^{[citation needed]} Anthropologist G. William Skinner at the University of California-Davis and Chinese researcher Yuan Jianhua have claimed that infanticide was fairly common in China before the 1990s and the widespread availability of ultrasounds to determine the sex of babies.^[36] Aside from avoidance of the penalties and restrictions of the state birth control policy, the root causes of infanticide, especially for baby girls whose health care and nutrition may sometimes not get the same attention as baby boys, may be poverty in rural China along with the traditional preference for boys for economic reasons.^{[citation needed]}

Gender-selected abortion, abandonment, and infanticide are illegal in China. Despite the Chinese legal position, the US State Department,^[37] the Parliament of the United Kingdom,^[38] and the human rights organization Amnesty International^[39] have all declared that China's family planning programs contribute to incidences of infanticide.

[edit] The "One-Two-Four" problem

As the one-child policy approaches the third generation, one adult child supports two parents and four grandparents. This leaves the oldest and most vulnerable generation with increased dependency on retirement funds, the state, or charity for support. If personal savings, pensions, or state welfare should fail, then the most senior citizens would be left entirely dependent upon their very small family or neighbors for support. In the event that the child is unable or unwilling to care for their parents and grandparents, or if that child fails to survive, the oldest generation may find itself destitute.^[40] To combat this problem, some provinces allow families where each parent was an "only child" to have two children.

[edit] Child development

Some parents over-indulge their only-child. The media referred to the indulged children in one-child families as "little emperors". Since the 1990s, some people worry this will result in a higher tendency toward poor social communication and cooperation skills among the new generation, as they have no siblings at home.^{[citation needed]} However, no social studies have investigated the ratio of these over-indulged children and to what extent they are indulged. With the first generation of one-child policy children (those born in 80s) reaching adulthood, such worries are reduced.

However, some 30 delegates called on the government in the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) in March 2007 to abolish the one-child rule because they believe "it creates social problems and personality disorders in young people." and "It is not healthy for children to play only with their parents and be spoiled by them: it is not right to limit the number to two, either." The proposal was prepared by Ye Tingfang, a professor at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, who suggested that the government at least restore the previous rule that allowed couples to have up to two children. According to this scholar, "the one-child limit is too extreme. It violates nature’s law and, in the long run, will lead to mother nature’s revenge."^[41][42]

[edit] Discrimination against Han Chinese

More than 90% of the population of China are Han Chinese. Most ethnic minorities have different quotas from Han, with the quotas depending on whether they are living in urban, rural, or remote regions. As a partial consequence, ethnic minorities have had their proportion in China grow from 6.1% in 1953, to 8.04% in 1990, 8.41％ in 2000, and 9.44% in 2005. While ethnic minorities represent less than 10% of the total population, they comprised 35% of the net increase in China's overall population between the censuses of 1982 and 1990,^[43] and 42% of the net increase in China's population between 1990 and 2000. According to the most recent survey, ethnic minorities are currently growing about 7 times faster than Han Chinese.^{[44][45][46][47]} However, this relative increase is not only due to differential birthrates but also to a process of ethnic revival or growing self-consciousness or reidentification of minority nationalities, which has been occurring over the past few decades.^{[48][49][50][51]}

This outcome was not something that the Chinese government wanted. Further, the policy was resisted especially in rural communities. In the face of such resistance, the policy would have required more drastic measures than the Chinese government was willing to be seen using. This led to criticism of China from population advocates such as Garrett Hardin who argued China needs to more strictly enforce the one-child policy.^[52]

"The Guanyin Who Sends Children" in a temple in the small town of Danshan, Sichuan.

[edit] Government corruption

Between 2000 to 2005 as many as 1,968 officials in central China's Hunan province have been found breaching the policy according to the provincial family planning commission. Also exposed by the commission are 21 national and local lawmakers, 24 political advisors, 112 entrepreneurs and 6 senior intellectuals.^[53] Penalties are not enforced for violating the policy, as the spokesman proclaimed "Three officials -- vice head of Tujia and Miao Autonomous Prefecture of Xiangxi with the surname as Peng, vice mayor of Loudi surnamed as Zhao, and vice mayor of Chenzhou with the surname of Lei, who were all found to have kept extramarital mistresses, -- were all convicted for charges such as embezzlement and taking bribes, but they were not punished for having more than one child."^[53]

[edit] The desire for children, fertility medicines, and family planning

Along with the political and economic constraints on having children in China, many people face medical problems as they seek to have children. Advertisements for fertility clinics appear frequently in the PRC media. Some pray for a child while others turn to fertility clinics. China Daily recently reported that wealthy couples are increasingly turning to fertility medicines to have multiple births, due to the lack of penalties against couples who have more than one child in their first birth. The report quoted a doctor from a main pediatric hospital as saying that dozens more multiple births were recorded in 2005.^[54]

[edit] Children born outside of China

In the Summer of 2006, new documents came to light indicating that Chinese nationals with children born abroad will be treated the same as Chinese nationals with Chinese born children. This evidence has led the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit to remand a litany of cases involving Chinese nationals seeking political asylum back to the Board of Immigration Appeals.^[55]

In August 2007, the Board of Immigration Appeals ruled that the new documents, even assuming that they are genuine, reflect only "general birth planning policies [...] that do not specifically show any likelihood that she or similarly situated Chinese nationals will be persecuted as a result of the birth of a second child in the United States." ^[56]

[edit] See also

• Demography of the People's Republic of China
• Human rights in the People's Republic of China
• Reproductive Health

[edit] References and Notes

[edit] Bibliography

• Better 10 Graves Than One Extra Birth, (ISBN 1-931550-92-1, Laogai Research Foundation)

[edit] External links

• Family Planning in China
• Illegal births and legal abortions – the case of China