China's one-child policy was implemented to curb overpopulation that strained the country's food supply and natural and economic resources following its industrialization in the s. Gender imbalance, an aging population, and a shrinking workforce are all effects of China's policy. To this day, China has the most skewed sex ratio at birth in the world, due to a cultural preference for male offspring.
The Chinese government, led by the Chinese Communist Party's Xi Jinping, ended the controversial one-child policy in Violators of China's one-child policy were fined, forced to have abortions or sterilizations, and lost their jobs.
Congressional-Executive Commission on China. The China Journal. Journal of Biosocial Science. Handbook of Families in Chinese Societies. Wealth Management.
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Select personalised ads. Apply market research to generate audience insights. Measure content performance. Develop and improve products. List of Partners vendors. Your Money. Personal Finance. Your Practice. Popular Courses. Markets International Markets. Table of Contents Expand. Understanding the One-Child Policy. Key Takeaways The one-child policy was a Chinese government policy to control population growth. Meanwhile, in most regions, households of non-Han ethnicity were allowed to have two or three children, regardless of gender.
A frequently used measure in studies of the OCP is the average monetary penalty rate for one unauthorized birth in the province-year from to Though the monetary penalty is only one aspect of the policy, and the government may take other administrative actions e.
The Illustration shows the pattern of policy fines from to in selected provinces and nationwide. At the very beginning of the OCP, Vice Premier Muhua Chen proposed that it would be necessary to pass new legislation imposing penalties on unauthorized births. However, subnational leaders faced practical difficulties in collecting penalties in addition to resistance and complaints from the populace. For example, Guangdong province received more than 5, letters complaining about the implementation of the OCP in Because local governments were more concerned about social stability than the central government, they had little incentive to design a high penalty rate.
Consistent with the Illustration , some local governments even lowered penalty rates after , and, until , there were few changes in fertility penalties. A major change in fine rates occurred at the end of the s though, when the central government linked the success of fertility control to promotions for local officials.
To achieve subnational compliance, policy must be supplemented with more detailed management by objectives ME There is a strong correlation between increases in fine rates and the incidence of government successions. Governors who instituted fine increases had higher chances of being promoted than their peers, and several rose to significant heights within the central government.
In addition, provincial governors who increased fertility fines tended to be younger. The average age of these 16 provincial governors was 56, which was significantly lower than the average age of other provincial governors 59 years.
These numbers suggest that the promotion incentive for provincial governors could be a major driving force for the changes in fertility fines. For example, Guangdong, one of the richest provinces in China, collected 1. Meanwhile, as a comparison, total local government expenditure on compulsory schooling in the province was A recent review of the literature summarizes four empirical approaches to identify the effects of the OCP [3]. The first approach uses the initial year of the policy, , as a cutoff and compares the birth behaviors of women before and after implementation of the OCP.
Under this approach, observations before form the control group and those after the treatment group. In general, this approach assumes there would be no change in the outcome variable e. The second approach compares the outcomes of Han Chinese and minorities before and after policy implementation in a difference-in-differences framework. Under this approach, minorities are used as the control group and Han people as the treatment group.
However, this requires a case-by-case analysis and one needs to be careful when drawing causal interpretations. For example, because Han-minority couples are allowed to give birth to a second child in certain regions as shown in Figure 1 , Han people have stronger incentives to marry minorities to obtain the extra birth quota. One direct consequence is a higher Han-minority marriage rate in regions with this preferential policy, as shown in Figure 2.
The third approach exploits the cross-sectional and temporal variations on fines for an illegal birth. As noted before, the fines change over time; it is thus plausible to exploit these variations to identify the effects of the fines. Unfortunately, there is no formal or accurate documentation for why the fines change.
Therefore, further justification is required to validate the use of fines as the main independent variable. The fourth approach explores variation between the intensity of OCP implementation across different regions in combination with the differential length of exposure of different birth cohorts to the OCP. Specifically, this approach constructs a measure based on excess births to Han women over and above the one child rule in each region while controlling for pre-existing fertility and community socio-economic status.
However, as noted in one recent study, this approach relies on the strong assumption that any unobserved region-specific shocks to fertility or other family outcomes over time are uncorrelated with the cross-sectional measure of the OCP enforcement intensity [3]. It should be noted that these four approaches are not exclusive. Some ongoing projects are employing several of them at once.
Given that official documentation on the policy is limited, researchers are likely to develop more empirical approaches in the future to address the current issues, such as data limitations, and gain a more complete understanding of the OCP.
Since the primary goal of the OCP was to restrict population growth, the first question to ask is whether it has been successful in this respect. The answer is generally yes, though the magnitude of its success varies according to different studies.
Their findings are consistent, in general. For example, it was found that a one standard deviation increase in the prevalence of contraceptives led to a 0. However, the findings in the more recent literature are mixed. For instance, one study used improved measures of policy to suggest that if earlier family planning policies had not been replaced by the OCP, fertility would still have declined below the replacement level, and that the additional effects of the OCP were fairly limited [5].
Therefore, while scholars tend to agree that the OCP has had significant effects on fertility, determining the magnitude of these effects remains an important and unanswered question.
Another demographic outcome commonly investigated in the literature is sex ratio. Incidentally correlated with the introduction of the OCP, the sex ratio at birth i. Because parents have been able to choose abortion instead of having a girl, many researchers argue that the OCP has contributed to the high sex ratio in China. One thought is that, among those prepared to have two children, at least some parents will have three.
However, I have interviewed many young Chinese couples about this subject and it is hard to find those who want bigger families these days. Generations of Chinese people have lived without siblings and are used to small families - affluence has meant less need for multiple children to become family-supporting workers, and young professionals say they'd rather give one child more advantages than spread their income among several kids.
The census, released this month, showed that around 12 million babies were born last year - a significant decrease from the 18 million in , and the lowest number of births recorded since the s.
The census was conducted in late - some seven million census takers had gone door to door to collect information from households. Given the sheer number of people surveyed, it is considered the most comprehensive resource on China's population, which is important for future planning. It was widely expected after the census data results were released that China would relax its family policy rules. China's leading media are giving a lot of fanfare to the "three-child policy".
Newspaper People's Daily, broadcaster CCTV and news agency Xinhua are all posting happy cartoon images of children today on their social media pages and saying that the new policy has "arrived". It is already the top talking point on popular social network Sina Weibo - posts mentioning the new policy have already racked up tens of thousands of views, and hundreds of thousands of comments.
More than , users have commented on Xinhua's upbeat post, and the ones with the most likes do not look upon the policy kindly. And with a shrinking labour market, young Chinese people today accept that they have to work longer hours.
Overtime and overwork are endemic. More women meanwhile are choosing to pursue further education and employment, rather than settle down early to start a family. The government's move in to allow couples to have two children failed to reverse the country's falling birth rate despite a two-year increase immediately afterwards. Yue Su, principal economist from The Economist Intelligence Unit, said: "While the second-child policy had a positive impact on the birth rate, it proved short-term in nature.
China's population trends have over the years been largely shaped by the one-child policy, which was introduced in to slow population growth. Families that violated the rules faced fines, loss of employment and sometimes forced abortions.
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