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Six questions on China’s one-child policy, answered

What is China’s one-child policy?

For more than three decades, this strictly enforced rule has meant that many Chinese couples could only have one child. They risked huge fines and varying degrees of harassment from local authorities if they had more than one.

China’s Communist Party leaders enacted the policy in 1980 to curb runaway population growth. It has been one of history’s biggest experiments in state-mandated demographic engineering and has been heavily debated.

The policy reshaped Chinese society, with birthrates plunging from 4.77 children per woman in the early 1970s to 1.64 in 2011, according to estimates by the United Nations . It also contributed to the world's most unbalanced sex ratio at birth, with boys far outnumbering girls.

What part of the policy is being changed?

China announced Friday that couples can have a second child if either of the parents is an only child. The change affects a limited group of only-child adults of child-bearing age, many of whom were born under the current policy.

But the rest of the policy remains in place — as does the vast, powerful family-planning bureaucracy, with offices in every city, town and village, that was created to enforce the original decree. The leaders are likely changing the policy because of an aging population and a possible future labor shortage.

What will the change mean?

Don’t necessarily expect a sudden surge in population. A lot of people in China were already allowed to have a second child under existing exceptions to the policy. For years, rural peasants whose first child was a girl were permitted to have a second child. In addition, couples who are both ethnic minorities and couples who are both only children were already allowed to have a second child.

Wang Feng, director of the Brookings-Tsinghua Center for Public Policy, offered what he called “an estimation” that at most “1 or 2 million births a year” might occur as a result of the policy change. That would be on top of the current level of 15 million annual births.

He and other experts said that even if given the option of having a second child, many urban couples will still choose to have only one because of the rising costs of housing and education in China’s cities.

How many people does this actually affect?

In China, good, hard numbers on a topic this sensitive are hard to come by. State-run media sometimes say that China has 150 million families with only one child, but some experts think the real number is larger. Even if that is true, no public statistics exist for how many of those only children have spouses with at least one sibling, the group that will now be permitted to have a second child.

Why is the one-child policy so hated and criticized?

Human rights groups have exposed forced abortions , infanticide and involuntary sterilizations, all banned in theory by the government.

The policy has also left quieter devastation in its wake in the form of childless parents — couples too old when their only child suddenly dies to have another.

Much resentment also stems from the huge fines the government collects for violations, estimated to total billions of dollars. No one knows the precise amount because it is kept secret, and the public is not told exactly where the money goes.

Lastly, critics say, there’s something disturbing and wrong with the government infringing on people’s sexual and family decisions by telling them whether they can have children and how many.

Has the policy done any good?

The government says the policy has prevented about 400 million births, which it sees as beneficial for a country whose enormous population poses social, economic and environmental challenges. On the global scale, China claimed in 2011 that its policy single- handedly delayed by five years the date by which the world's population reached 7­­ billion .

Li Qi contributed to this report.

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The Chinese government implemented the one-child policy mandating that the vast majority of couples in the country could only have one child. The phrase “one-child policy,” used often outside China, can be a bit misleading: the one-child rule didn't apply to all, exceptions were frequently made, and local officials had discretion over how population limits were achieved. These collective efforts were nevertheless intended to alleviate the social, economic, and environmental problems associated with the country's rapidly growing population. The rule was introduced in 1979 and phased out in 2015.

Key Takeaways

• The “one-child policy” is a name given to Chinese government laws for controlling population growth. According to estimates, it prevented about 400 million births in the country.
• Introduced in 1979 and discontinued in 2015, the policy was enforced through a mix of incentives and sanctions.
• The one-child policy has had three important consequences for China's demographics: it reduced the fertility rate considerably, it skewed China's gender ratio because people preferred to abort or abandon their female babies, and resulted in a labor shortage given the increasing proportion of the population who were older adults.

Understanding China's One-Child Policy

The one-child policy refers to a set of laws implemented beginning in 1979 in response to explosive population growth that government officials feared would lead to a demographic disaster. China has a long history of encouraging birth control and family planning. In the 1950s, when population growth started to outpace the food supply, the government started promoting birth control.

However, by the late 1970s, China’s population was quickly approaching 1 billion, and the Chinese government considered ways to curb population growth. This effort began in 1979 with mixed results but was implemented more seriously and uniformly in 1980, as the government standardized the practice nationwide.

There were, however, exceptions for ethnic minorities, for those whose firstborn was labeled as disabled, and for rural families whose firstborn was not a boy. The policy was most effective in urban areas since those in China’s agrarian communities resisted it to a greater extent.

Initially, the one-child policy was meant to be a temporary measure, though, in the end, it may have prevented up to 400 million births. Ultimately, China ended its one-child policy after it became apparent that it might have been too effective: many Chinese were heading into retirement, and the nation’s population had too few young people to provide for the older population’s retirement and healthcare while sustaining continued economic growth.

The government-mandated policy was formally ended Oct. 29, 2015, after its rules had been slowly relaxed to allow more couples fitting certain criteria to have a second child. Now, all couples are allowed to have two children.

There were different methods of enforcement, including incentives and sanctions, that varied across China. For those who complied, there were financial incentives and preferential employment opportunities. For those who violated the policy, there were sanctions, economic and otherwise. At times, the government employed more draconian measures, including forced abortions and sterilization.

The one-child policy was officially discontinued in 2015. The efficacy of the policy itself, though, has been challenged, as it's typical that population growth generally slows as societies gain in income, as happened in China during this time. In China's case, as the birthrate declined, the death rate declined, too, and life expectancy increased.

One-Child Policy Implications

The one-child policy had serious implications for China's demographic and economic future. In the early 2020s, China's fertility rate stands at 1.6, among the lowest in the world. (The U.S. is at 1.7.)

China now has a considerable gender skew—there are roughly 3 to 4% more males than females in the country. With the implementation of the one-child policy and the preference for male children, China had a rise in the abortion of female fetuses, the number of baby girls left in orphanages, and even in infanticides of baby girls.

This continues to affect marriage and birthrates around the country. Fewer females means there were fewer women of childbearing age in China. The drop in birthrates meant fewer children, which occurred as death rates dropped and longevity rates rose. It is estimated that the share of adults ages 65 and older will have risen from just 12% to a projected 26% by 2050. Thus, older parents will be relying on their children to support them, and have fewer children to do so. This is compounded by the massive urbanization of China since 1980, with those living in urban areas increasing from 19% in 1980 to 60% in recent years. China is also facing a potential labor shortage and will have trouble supporting this aging population through its state services.

Finally, the policy led to the proliferation of undocumented, non-first-born children. Their status as undocumented makes it impossible to leave China legally, as they cannot register for a passport. They have no access to public education. Oftentimes, their parents were fined or removed from their jobs.

One-Child Policy FAQs

No. China reverted to a two-child policy after its one-child policy ended in 2015, and the restrictions were gradually loosened before its official end.

Did China's One-Child Policy Increase Its Economic Growth?

There's a chicken or egg quality to any answer: China's one-child policy, by initially reducing population growth, could have contributed to economic gains by creating a larger working-age population relative to children, which would have boosted productivity and savings. However, it's also the case that countries with increases in national wealth tend to have population growth that slows down. Thus, the increase in economic growth in China may have helped reduce the number of Chinese newborns over this time, not the other way around. Whatever the case, the long-term effects of these demographic shifts from about 1979 to 2015 include a shrinking labor force and a greater proportion of the population that is retired, posing challenges for continued economic growth and the social safety net.

Yes. China has implemented or increased parental tax deductions, family leave, housing subsidies for families, and spending on reproductive health and child care services to increase the national birthrate since ending the one-child policy formally in 2015. The Chinese government also promotes flexible work hours and work-from-home options for parents. Most interesting are policies one wouldn't consider related to the birthrate at first glance, such as banning private tutoring companies from profiting off teaching core subjects during weekends or holidays. By lowering educational pressure on children and this often costly financial load on parents, China is attempting to lower the burdens of parenting. With greater financial security, parents may feel better able to handle additional children. Another upshot? By reducing pressure academically, especially on weekends and holidays, families can spend more time together, thus fostering greater family connections.

Violators of China's one-child policy could be fined, forced to have abortions or sterilizations or lose their jobs.

China's one-child policy, a phrase used for a set of laws related to population growth implemented starting in 1979, represented one of the more draconian modern attempts to intervene in a country's rising demographics. While the population did slow, the policy also resulted in unintended consequences, such as an aging population, gender imbalance, and a shrinking workforce. Its discontinuation in 2015 and subsequent measures to encourage higher birth rates reflect China's complex challenges in balancing population control with sustainable economic and social development.

J.N. Wasserstrom. "China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know." Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. Pages 81-84.

Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada. " China’s One Child Policy ." Page 1. 

National Library of Medicine. " The Effects of China’s Universal Two-Child Policy ."

Library of Congress. " China’s One Child Policy. "

David Howden and Yang Zhou. “ China’s One-Child Policy: Some Unintended Consequences .” Economic Affairs. 34/3. Pages 353-69.

The World Bank. " Fertility Rate, Total (Births per Woman) - China ."

Pew Research Center. " Without One-child Policy, China Still Might Not See Baby Boom, Gender Balance ."

Gao, Fang., Li, Xia. " From One to Three: China’s Motherhood Dilemma and Obstacle to Gender Equality ." Women. (2021.) Pages 252-266. 

Population Reference Bureau. " What Can We Learn From the World’s

Largest Population of Older People? "

United Nations. " Revision of World Urbanization Prospects ."

World Health Organization. " Ageing and Health in China ."

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China's Former 1-Child Policy Continues To Haunt Families

The legacy of China's one-child rule is still painfully felt by many of those who suffered for having more children. Ran Zheng for NPR hide caption

The legacy of China's one-child rule is still painfully felt by many of those who suffered for having more children.

Editor's note: This story contains descriptions that may be disturbing.

LINYI, China — Outside, rain falls. Inside, a middle-school student completes his homework. His mother watches him approvingly.

She is especially protective of him. He's the youngest of three children this mother had under China's one-child policy.

Giving birth to him was a huge risk — and she took no chances. She carried her son to term while hiding in a relative's house. She wanted to avoid the "family planning officials" in her home village, just outside Linyi, a city of 11 million in China's northern Shandong province, where the policy's enforcement was especially violent.

What was she hiding from? What could the family planning officials have done to her? She demurs, her voice growing quiet. "All we can do is go on living," she says. "There is no use in trying to make sense of society."

A mother and a grandmother take care of a child in Beijing on Jan. 1, 2016. Married couples in China in 2016, were allowed to have two children, after concerns over an aging population and shrinking workforce ushered in an end to the country's controversial one-child policy. Fred Dufour/AFP via Getty Images hide caption

Her son is part of the last generation of children in China whose births were ruled illegal at the time. Anxious that rapid population growth would strain the country's welfare systems and state-planned economy, the Chinese state began limiting how many children families could have in the late 1970s.

The limit in most cases was just one child. Then in 2016, the state allowed two children. And in May, after a new census showed the birth rate had slowed, China raised the cap to three children. State media celebrated the news.

But the legacy of the one-child rule is still painfully felt by many parents who suffered for having multiple children. For some, the pain is still too much to bear.

"It has been so many years, and I have let the pain go," the mother of three says, eyes downcast. "If you carry it with you all the time, it gets too tiring."

A mother's quandary

One night in August 2008, the mother made a fateful decision. Her body was giving her all the telltale signs that she was pregnant — again.

She already had two children and had gone through four abortions afterward, to avoid paying the ruinously high "social maintenance fee" demanded from families as penalty when they contravened birth limits.

Medical staff massage babies at an infant care center in Yongquan, in Chongqing municipality, in southwest China, on Dec. 15, 2016. China had 1 million more births in 2016 than in 2015, following the end of the one-child policy. AFP via Getty Images hide caption

But this time she felt differently.

"I had already had two children but my heart just did not feel right," says the woman, now in her 50s, who works part time in a canning factory. NPR isn't using her name to protect her identity because of the trauma she suffered. "I thought this is it — if I do not have this child, my body will not be able to have any more."

Officials in her village were actively policing families under the one-child policy. Enforcement of the policy had begun to loosen by the early 2000s, as horrific stories of forced abortions and botched sterilizations caused policymakers to rethink the rule. But starting in 2005, the authorities began enforcing the policy with a renewed ferocity in Linyi.

So the mother went into hiding to carry her son to term. One night, family planning officials approached her husband, intending to pressure him and his wife into ending the pregnancy. He used a pickax to drive them off and was imprisoned for that for half a year.

An old friend of hers, the blind lawyer Chen Guangcheng , knows full well what she and tens of thousands of other women in Linyi city went through.

Chinese parents, who have children born outside the country's one-child policy, protest outside the family planning commission in an attempt to have their fines canceled in Beijing, on Jan. 5, 2016. For decades, China's family planning policy limited most urban couples to one child and rural couples to two if their first was a girl. Ng Han Guan/AP hide caption

"The doctors would inject poison directly into the baby's skull to kill it," Chen says, drawing on recordings he made of interviews with hundreds of women and their families in Linyi. "Other doctors would artificially induce labor. But some babies were alive when they were born and began crying. The doctors strangled or drowned those babies."

The terror of such enforcement of birth limits was widespread in Linyi, even if residents were not themselves planning on giving birth.

"Officials would kidnap you if you tried to have two children. If you were hiding and they could not find you, they would kidnap your elder relatives and make them stand in cold water, in the winter," remembers Lu Bilun, a resident.

Lu says the harassment became so savage that elderly residents of Linyi became afraid to leave their homes out of fear they might be kidnapped. Lu says he paid a 4,000 yuan fine to have his second son in 2006 (about $500 at the time), after hiding his wife for months. "This was not your average level of policy enforcement. It was vicious," he says.

Chen, the lawyer, mounted a class action lawsuit on behalf of Linyi's women. The suit led to an apology from the authorities in Linyi and a reduction in the kidnappings, beatings and forced abortions.

Children ride a toy train at a shopping mall in Beijing, on Oct. 30, 2015. China's decision to abolish its one-child policy offered some relief to couples and to sellers of baby-related goods, but the government hasn't lifted birth limits entirely. Andy Wong/AP hide caption

But the Chinese government punished Chen for his activism by imprisoning him, then trapping him for nearly three years in his home , in a village just outside Linyi.

In 2012, Chen escaped by scaling a wall and running to the next village, despite being blind and having broken his foot during the escape. There, he was picked up by supporters and driven to the U.S. Embassy in Beijing. He was able to fly to the U.S . after weeks of tense negotiation. Today, he lives in Maryland with his family.

The price of defiance

"The policy was wrong and what we did with Chen was right," says a neighbor of Chen, the lawyer who sued the city of Linyi. The man wants to remain unnamed because he believes he could be harassed again for speaking of that time.

In the 1990s, he says, family planning officials ambushed him in his home at night and beat him with sticks in an effort to convince his wife to abort their third son.

Chinese lawyer Chen Guangcheng attends a rally to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre June 4, 2019, at the West Lawn of the U.S. Capitol. Chen had been persecuted and detained in China after his work advising villagers and speaking out official abuses under the one-child rule. Alex Wong/Getty Images hide caption

"Our country's leaders did not want us to have children and I didn't know why, but we could not do anything about it," he sighs.

He and his wife persevered and had three sons. They did not officially register the last two to avoid paying a fine, but the father says he still paid a bribe to family planning officials to avoid further harassment. These economic penalties depleted his life savings, a financial impact that compounded over the ensuing years.

The policy permeates through Chinese society in other, sometimes unexpected ways. Because many prioritized having a son over a daughter, orphanages experienced a surge in baby girls who were abandoned or put up for adoption. Single's Day, China's biggest online shopping holiday — akin to Black Friday in the U.S. — is a recognition of the many bachelors who are unable to find partners in a gender-skewed society.

"A very unbalanced population gender-wise has also led to a rise in property prices in major cities because families of men have bought apartments to make their sons eligible in a marriage market where there are millions of missing women," says Mei Fong , who wrote a book on the one-child rule. "These effects will be felt in the generation ahead."

A child walks near government propaganda one of which reads "1.3 billion people united" on the streets of Beijing, China, Tuesday, March 8, 2016. Ng Han Guan/AP hide caption

According to the census conducted last year, the population is aging and there are fewer young children and working-age people, a major demographic shift that comes with its own economic strains. That's pushing policymakers to consider raising the official retirement age — currently 60 for men and 55 for women — for the first time in 40 years.

Yet the authorities still only allow couples to have three children. Why won't China remove all caps?

"Despite all the overwhelming demographic evidence, they're saying, 'We need to control you,'" says the author, Fong. Anxious about already strained public education and health care systems, China's leadership is reportedly considering ditching limits entirely. It has been slow to completely dismantle its massive family planning bureaucracy built up over the past four decades. And according to an Associated Press investigation , it continues to impose stricter controls over births — including forced sterilizations — among ethnic minorities, like the Turkic Uyghurs.

Some demographers in China argue that instituting birth limits was necessary for keeping birth rates low. But Stuart Gietel-Basten, a demographer at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, cautions there is no definitive answer. "There is only one China and there is only one one-child policy, so it is kind of impossible to say the real effect of that was [of the policy]," he says.

Families were already having fewer children in the 1970s, before the policy took force in 1979. "The one-child policy was not the only thing that happened in China in the 1980s and 1990s," Gietel-Basten says. "There was also rapid urbanization, economic growth, industrialization, female emancipation and more female labor force participation."

A man and a child are reflected on a glass panel displaying a tiger at the Museum of Natural History in Beijing, Dec. 2, 2016. Andy Wong/AP hide caption

It was worth the cost

The fact that the children are alive at all makes Chen, the lawyer, feel his seven years in prison and house arrest were all worth it.

"I really feel happy. Even if I had to go to prison and endure beatings, in the end, these children were able to survive. They must be in middle school or high school by now."

The mother of one of these middle schoolers holds her son close. Part of the reason she demurred when first speaking to NPR was because of how dearly her family fought for his birth.

Her worries these days are more mundane. She wants to start preparing for her son's marriage — a costly endeavor as rural families expect the husband to provide a material guarantee for any future wife.

"That requires buying them a car, an apartment. No one can afford that," she complains.

Her job at a nearby canning factory refuses to hire her full time, she says, because she is a mother of three and needs to leave every afternoon to pick up her son from school.

And so, ironically, now that people are allowed to have more children, they are increasingly reluctant to, because of the high cost of child care and education.

"Women have it all figured out now — they won't have more kids even when they're told to have more!" the mother laughs helplessly.

"People act in funny ways," she says. "There is no point in controlling them."

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One Child Policy, Essay Example

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In the early 20 th century, Chinese government was baffled about the fast rate at which the population was growing. The one child policy was enacted in 1979 and is currently in effect. The policy is enforced through incentives such as health care, educational opportunities, job and housing opportunities, and disincentives for violators of the policy. Violators face fines, loss of educational access, and other privileges. Nonetheless, the policy has never been uniformly enforced throughout China. Initially, the goal of this policy was to ensure that the Chinese population remained under 1.2 billion. This goal was intended to be met by promotion of contraception and forced sterilizations.  After carefully examining the risks and benefits China’s one child policy, it is believed that a new two-child approach is the best alternative for the future of China.

The one child policy has caused negative demographic consequences. The one child policy had estimated that China’s population would be reduced by more than 300 million in the first twenty years (Mosher, 2006). Although it has decreased the population, it has created a high sex imbalance with males unequally outnumbering females. The one child policy has also been linked to sex-selective abortions, infanticide, and other social safety problems. There are many speculations about what is happening to the girls in Chinese society. For example,

“Medical advancements and technology have played a key role in creating this surplus of boys. The Chinese government contracted with GE to provide cart-mounted ultrasound that could be run on generators so that the most obscure village had access to fetal sex determination. Given the ability to know the sex of their unborn children, many parents aborted female fetuses. Sadly, such abortions do not account for all of the missing girls in China” (Short, 2000).

Many regulations attempt to guard against sex determination abortion, but evidence shows that there has been an increase in the use of ultrasound B machines, which determines the sex of fetuses (Short, 2000). The use of ultrasound technology for abortion purposes is illegal, but it is speculated that sex selected abortions account for the great decline in female births (Wan, Fan, & Lin, 1994). In rural areas, many families simply hide their female children or give them to nearby families in order to avoid reporting the births. Sadly, some girls are just abandoned and left to die (Zilberberg, 2007).

There are several negative side effects of the one-child policy. China does not have a national social security plan. Taking care of the older generations will fall upon the one-child generation. Persons over the age of 65 currently make up about 25 percent of the population. Consequently, a one child will be responsible for taking care of four grandparents and two parents. This has become known as the “4:2:1 problem”. Another negative consequence is what has grown to be called the “Little Emperor Syndrome”, which discusses the psychological effects the one-child policy has on the children. These children have been called the spoiled generation because they are doted by parents and grandparents. The rise in childhood obesity has been linked to this syndrome. One in every five Chinese children is obese (Zhan, 2004). China has been traditionally known for great health and dietary practices. A final consequence of the one-child policy has been the difficulty of men to find a woman to marry. A direct result of this scenario is the increase in trade and sell of kidnapped women. To date, about 110,000 have been freed during crackdowns by Chinese government in Vietnamese and North Korea. It is believed that this increase in sex ratio imbalance will lead to the increase in sex related crimes and violence (Fong, 2002).

There are several steps that the Chinese government can take to remedy the many problems that the one-child policy has created. One immediate remedy would be the elimination of the use of the ultrasound B machine to determine fetuses’ sex before birth. This would eliminate mothers aborting female children. Another remedy for the problem is to relax or eliminate the one-child policy. Relaxing the policy would allow families in certain areas to have more than one child to help balance the sex ratio. In other words, in areas where men greatly outnumber women, parents would be able to have more than one child. Yet, eliminating the policy could possibly fix the problem. This would allow nature to take its course and over time the problem would be eliminated. Finally, enacting a two-child policy would help increase the decreasing female population. There is no quick remedy that will fix this problem overnight for the Chinese countries. When couples are allowed to have two children, it might discourage them from discriminating against female babies (Fong, 2002). A two child policy will allow will double the birth rate and close the gap of children to parent to grandparent gap. This will take time and will require some drastic changes in the way Chinese society views females. Through education, women will continue to fight for equality and hopefully, parents will one day value female children just as much as they value male children. Finally, an incentive program could be implemented. First time parents who have a female child could be given some type of monetary incentives and allowed to have a second child. However, the second child will not receive the monetary incentive regardless to its sex. However, if the parents have a boy the first time and a girl the second time, they could still receive the monetary incentive. This would encourage a balance between the sexes and parents would not prefer one sex over the other.

Stories of forced abortions and sterilizations are common in China. For example,

“Enforcement of the one-child policy during the early 1980s was controversial not only in China but around the globe. Early stories emerging from the rural villages focused on coercive practices, including forced late-term abortions and involuntary sterilization, as well as the “neighborly” snitching on pregnant couples who dared to conceive a second child. Backlash in rural communities throughout China prompted the government to modify the rule in the mid-1980s, allowing a second child in families whose first child was either a girl or disabled” (Liu, Wyshak, and Larsen, 2004).

Many have accused the Chinese government performing forced abortions on women who were past the abortion cut off limit. Many of the forced abortions are carried out on unmarried women. The family is the basic unit of society and shapes the individual’s behaviors and ideology. Ones interaction and time spent with siblings produce memories that last a life time. Lack of this connection will definitely affect the dynamics of family life. Much research has been done to determine how sibling structure, or the lack of structure, affects individuals in adulthood. China is under the direct influence of Confucian ideology, which teaches that a person’s life is continued through his family. According to this ideology, when a person dies, his spirit and blood remain in the word within his offspring. Traditionally, Chinese families desire large families and emphasis male dominance. Consequently, gender inequality is deep rooted in Chinese culture. Males are expected to fulfill filial duty by inheriting their parents’ estates and performing religious ceremonies. China, along with many other societies, constrains women to the home. Men are the primary source of income for their families (Wong, 1997). Women were not considered as descendants, so they were not given the same opportunities for education and other privileges as males were. Consequently, Chinese society has produced women who are not well equipped to operate society. However, under the one child policy, women are being given opportunities they have never had before. According to data, these girls are receiving education that is equivalent to boys and they are inheriting estates of their families (Liu, Wyshak, & Larsen, 2004). Nonetheless, for the few females that are able to reach such a status, there are countless others who were aborted and abandoned.

Mental and emotional health are issues that are commonly ignored in Chinese society because disclosure of personal problems publicly has been frowned upon for years. Consequently, data on the mental health of adolescents is very scarce. However, in recent years studies have emerged documenting mental issues that children of the one child policy are encountering. A study was conducted on 266 Chinese adolescents who were products of the one child policy. The researchers used the Beck Depression Inventory and discovered that about 65 percent of the children screened meet the criteria for depressed. About 10 percent of them were in the severely depressed range. Girls were also more likely to show traits of depression than only child’s who were male (Chen, Rubin, & Li, 1995).Psychologists believe that the increased incidences of depression and anxiety can be directly linked to the increased pressure that is placed upon female only children. According to Fong, gender directly affects a person’s experience in society. This idea is based upon feminist perspective. Accordingly, females experience the world in a different manner than males do. From birth, females have been expected and taught to behave a certain way due to cultural norms. However, due to the one child policy, many women are expected to confront the unwritten rules they have been taught to live by.

Works Cited

Chen, X., Rubin, K.H., & Li, D. (1995). Depressed mood in Chinese children: Relations with school performance and family environment. J ournal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 63 , 938-947.

Fong, Vanessa L. 2002. China’s One-Child Policy and the Empowerment of Urban Daughters. American Anthropologist 104 (4): 1098-1109.

Liu, J., G. Wyshak, and U. Larsen. (2004). Physical Well-Being and School Enrollment: A Comparison of Adopted and Biological Children in One-Child Families in China. Social Science and Medicine 59 : 609-623.

Mosher, S. W. (2006). Winter. China’s One-Child Policy: Twenty-Five Years Later. The Human Life Review : 76-101.

Short, S. E., M. Linmao, et al. (2000). Birth Planning and Sterilization in China. Population Studies 54 (3): 279-291.

Wan, C., C. Fan, and G. Lin. (1994). A Comparative Study of Certain Differences inIndividuality and Sex-Based Differences Between 5- And 7-Years Old Only Children andNon Only Children. Acta Psychological Sinica 16 : 383-391.

Wong, Y. L. R. (1997). Dispersing the ‘Public’ and the ‘Private’: Gender and the State in the Birth Planning Policy of China. Gender and Society 11 (4): 509-525.

Zhan, H. J. 2004. “Socialization or Social Structure: Investigating Predictors of Attitudes Toward

Filial Responsibility Among Chinese Urban Youth From One and Multiple ChildFamilies.” International Journal of Aging and Human

Zilberberg, J. (2007). Sex Selection and Restricting Abortion and Sex Determination. Bioethics 21 (9):517-519.

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How does the one child policy impact social and economic outcomes?

A strict policy on fertility affects every aspect of economic life

National University of Singapore, Singapore, and IZA, Germany

Elevator pitch

The 20th century witnessed the birth of modern family planning and its effects on the fertility of hundreds of millions of couples around the world. In 1979, China formally initiated one of the world’s strictest family planning programs—the “one child policy.” Despite its obvious significance, the policy has been significantly understudied. Data limitations and a lack of detailed documentation have hindered researchers. However, it appears clear that the policy has affected China’s economy and society in ways that extend well beyond its fertility rate.

Key findings

Due to large variation in how the one child policy was implemented across regions and ethnicities, researchers are able to exploit natural variation in their analyses, which makes empirical results reliable.

Strictness of policy implementation is associated with promotion incentives for local leaders.

The one child policy significantly curbed population growth, though there is no consensus on the magnitude.

Under the policy, households tried to have additional children without breaking the law; some unintended consequences include higher reported rates of twin births and more Han-minority marriages.

There is no solid evidence that the one child policy contributed to human capital accumulation through the traditional “quantity–quality” trade-off channel.

Current economic studies mainly focus on short-term effects, while the long-term or lagged effects are substantially understudied; thus, statements about consequences and suggestions for policy designs are still missing.

The one child policy is associated with significant problems, such as an unbalanced sex ratio, increased crime, and individual dissatisfaction toward the government.

Author's main message

China’s one child policy is possibly the largest social experiment in the history of the human race. The behavior responses to the policy offer important insights for other studies in labor, development, and public economics. To date, researchers have found that a series of outcomes, such as a lower fertility rate, an unbalanced sex ratio at birth, and higher human capital, are potentially associated with the policy. However, the answers to many important questions are far from satisfactory, and some (e.g. the long-term effects on lifecycle outcomes) have received little attention.

The 20th century included the inception of modern family planning, which restricted the fertility of hundreds of millions of couples around the world. Due to concerns about the world’s unprecedented rate of population growth in the mid-20th century, some aid agencies and international organizations began to support the establishment of family planning programs. About 40 years later, in the mid-1990s, large-scale family planning programs were active in 115 countries.

China’s “one child policy” (OCP) is the largest among the world’s family planning programs. In the 1970s, after two decades of explicitly encouraging population growth, policymakers in China began enacting a series of measures to curb it. The OCP was formally initiated in 1979 and firmly established across the country in 1980. It was the first time that family planning policy became formal law in China. Differing from birth control policies in many other countries, the OCP assigned a compulsory general “one-birth” quota to each couple, though its implementation has varied considerably across regions for different ethnicities at different times. The policy affected millions of couples and lasted more than 30 years. According to the World Bank, the fertility rate in China dropped from 2.81 in 1979 to 1.51 in 2000. The reduced fertility rate is likely to have affected the Chinese labor market profoundly.

Despite its grand scope, due to data limitations, the literature on the OCP is relatively small. This article reviews some of the recent studies on the topic, with a focus on the policy’s potential social and economic consequences, including consequences related to fertility, sex ratios, and education, as well as individual behavior responses, such as changes to reported twin births and interethnic marriages. By comparing the results of the existing literature and ongoing studies in China to those in other countries, it appears that the OCP has had a large and persistent impact on many aspects of society. Investigating these impacts may shed light on related issues in other realms of research, such as economics, demographics, and sociology.

Discussion of pros and cons

Variations in ocp implementation.

In 1979, the Chinese government formally initiated the OCP to alleviate social, economic, and environmental problems such as the high unemployment rate and scarcity of land resources. In recognition of diverse demographic and socio-economic conditions across China, the central government issued “Document 11” in February 1982 which allowed provincial governments to issue specific and locally adjusted regulations. Two years later, the central government issued “Document 7” which further stipulated that regulations regarding birth control were to be made in accordance with local conditions and were to be approved by the provincial Standing Committee of the People’s Congress and provincial-level governments. This document devolved responsibility from the central government to the local and provincial governments.

As opposed to many family planning policies in other countries, the OCP was compulsory rather than voluntary. As the name suggests, the policy restricted a couple to having only one child. However, there were some exemptions. The birth quota varied according to residence (urban/rural) and ethnicity (Han/non-Han). Since Han ethnicity is by far the largest in China, accounting for 93% of the population, the policy mainly restricted the fertility of people with Han ethnicity. In general, Han households in urban regions were only allowed to have one child, while most households in rural areas could have a second child if their first was female (this exception is called the “one-and-a-half-child policy”). 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 1979 to 2000. The OCP regulatory fine (which is called the “social child-raising fee” in China, and for brevity is referred to as the “policy fine” in this article) is formulated in multiples of annual income. Though the monetary penalty is only one aspect of the policy, and the government may take other administrative actions (e.g. loss of party membership or employment), it is still a good proxy for the policy because an increase in fines is usually associated with other stricter policies. The Illustration shows the pattern of policy fines from 1980 to 2000 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 5,000 letters complaining about the implementation of the OCP in 1984. In response, the central government fully authorized the provincial governments to determine their own “tax rates” for excessive births with the issuance of Document 7 in 1984. 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 1984, and, until 1989, there were few changes in fertility penalties.

A major change in fine rates occurred at the end of the 1980s though, when the central government linked the success of fertility control to promotions for local officials. As stated in the book Governing China’s Population : “Addressing governors in spring 1989 Li Peng (current premier) said that population remained in a race with grain, the outcome of which would affect the survival of the Chinese race. To achieve subnational compliance, policy must be supplemented with more detailed management by objectives (ME 890406). At a meeting on birth policy in the premier’s office, Li Peng explained that such targets should be ‘evaluative’” [2] .

In March 1991, to show resoluteness, the central government listed family planning among the three basic state policies in China’s Eighth Five-Year Plan passed by the National People’s Council. The Eighth Five-Year Plan explicitly set a goal of reducing the natural growth rate of the country’s population to less than 1.25% on average during the following decade. To achieve such a challenging objective, national leaders employed a “responsibility system” to induce subnational or provincial officials to set high fine rates.

During the short period between 1989 and 1992, over half of the country’s provinces (16 out of 30) saw a significant increase in their fine rate, with the average rate increasing from 1.0 to 2.8 times a household’s yearly income. Indeed, 16 of the 21 significant increases in the policy’s history (i.e. increases of more than one times a household’s income) occurred during this period.

There is a strong correlation between increases in fine rates and the incidence of government successions. Among the 16 significant increases, 12 happened during the first two years of new provincial governors’ tenures. 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. This is also consistent with the premise that the incentive to raise fine rates depends on a governor’s personal characteristics, such as inauguration time and age.

The amount collected via the policy fine was not made public until recently: the total was about 20 billion RMB yuan (US$ 3.3 billion) among 24 provinces that reported fine rates in 2012. For example, Guangdong, one of the richest provinces in China, collected 1.5 billion yuan in 2012. Meanwhile, as a comparison, total local government expenditure on compulsory schooling in the province was 10.5 billion.

Empirical approaches to identify the effects of the OCP

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, 1979, as a cutoff and compares the birth behaviors of women before and after implementation of the OCP. Under this approach, observations before 1979 form the control group and those after 1979 the treatment group. In general, this approach assumes there would be no change in the outcome variable (e.g. birth rate) after 1979 if there was no fertility restriction.

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. This methodology requires that the changes in outcome variables of Han and minorities be the same without the OCP and assumes that minorities’ outcomes are not affected by the OCP. 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. Furthermore, these changes may only reflect one aspect of the policy’s effects. 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.

Effects of the OCP on fertility and the sex ratio

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.

Some early studies investigated how fertility responded to the policy’s restrictions [4] . 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 0.5 standard deviation decrease in the total fertility rate.

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] . By contrast, a study from 2011 used two rounds of the Chinese Population Census and found that the OCP has had a large negative effect on fertility; the average effect on post-treatment cohorts’ probability of having a second child is as large as -11 percentage points [6] . 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.e. males to females) increased by 0.2 over the course of 25 years, from 0.95 in 1980 to 1.15 in 2005. This phenomenon has been termed “missing women” by Amartya Sen. Since there is a strong preference for male children in China, restrictions have led to parents selecting to have/not have a child based on the results of ultrasonography technology [7] . 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 study exploited the regional and temporal variation in fines levied for unauthorized births and found that higher fine regimes are associated with higher ratios of males to females [1] . The results are especially true for the second or third births: a 100% increase in the fine rate is associated with a 0.8 and 2.3 percentage point increase in the probability of having a male child in the second and third births, respectively. One of the previously mentioned studies used a different methodology, but reached a similar finding [6] . The study suggests that the effect of the OCP accounts for about 57% and 54% of the total increase in sex ratios for the 1991–2000 and 2001–2005 birth cohorts, respectively.

The imbalanced sex ratio may help to explain some puzzling phenomena in China, such as a high saving rate. In turn, this can be viewed as a possible consequence of the OCP. For example, one study found that as the sex ratio rises, Chinese parents with a son increase their savings rate in order to improve their son’s relative attractiveness for marriage [8] . They find that the increase in the sex ratio from 1990 to 2007 can explain about 60% of the actual increase in the household savings rate during the same period.

Furthermore, the imbalanced sex ratio may lead to other serious social consequences, including increased crime. One study used the exogenous variation in sex ratio caused by the OCP to see its effect on crime and found an elasticity of crime with respect to the sex ratio of 16- to 25-year-olds of 3.4, suggesting that male sex ratios can account for one-seventh of the rise in crime [7] . The study proposes that one possible mechanism for this increase could be the adverse marriage market due to the unbalanced sex ratio.

Effects of the OCP on human capital accumulation

One established relationship between fertility and human capital accumulation is the child quantity–quality trade-off. However, many empirical economists have examined the relationship in the case of China and found mixed evidence. The OCP used birth quotas to control population growth. As such, it provides a potential external shock to the size of families and thus enables one to study causality between family size and children’s education.

One analysis used the plausibly exogenous changes in family size caused by relaxations in the OCP to estimate the effect of the number of children in a family on school enrollment for the first child [9] . Surprisingly, the results show that having an additional child increased the likelihood of school enrollment of the first child by about 16 percentage points, implying the relationship between quantity and quality is not a “trade-off,” but rather “complementary.” The author provides several explanations, including greater economies of scale, enhanced permanent income, and increased labor supply of mothers.

Taking an alternate approach, another study exploited the exogenous variation in twin births in different birth orders to estimate the potential gain in human capital by policy-induced compressed family size [10] . The authors used the policy’s characteristics to tell the story: producing twins on the first birth results in an exogenous shock to family size in urban regions, whereas having twins on the second birth represents an exogenous shock to family size in rural regions because parents in these areas are already allowed to have a second child. The results show a modest but positive effect of compressed family size induced by the OCP on human capital, as measured by health and education.

The above findings suggest that the effects of the OCP on human capital are not well established when only considering the quality–quantity trade-off. For example, a study from 2010 investigated the impact of fertility policies on the socio-economic status and labor supply of women aged 15–49 years in Colombia. The results suggest that women impacted by birth control policy during their teenage years are more likely to have higher education. One possible explanation is that people are more incentivized to achieve higher education if they expect to have lower fertility. As opposed to the quality–quantity trade-off, which only affects post-policy birth cohorts, the effects from lower fertility expectations may be present among those who were born before the policy’s implementation, but grew up during its tenure. This finding calls for further examination of the OCP’s impact on human capital accumulation. This is important because it suggests another explanation for how fertility affects economic growth.

Discussion on the OCP’s effects on human capital is still ongoing. The varied findings imply that the answer to the human capital question may depend on the individuals/cohorts examined and on the model specification employed. Although it is difficult to answer whether and to what extent the OCP increased human capital, the policy itself provides plausibly exogenous variations for future studies to examine.

Effects of the OCP on other family outcomes

Other outcomes, such as divorce, labor supply, and rural-to-urban migration have received less attention in the literature, though they are investigated in a recent study [3] . The results suggest that regions with stricter fertility policy enforcement tend to have a greater likelihood of divorce, higher male labor force participation rates, and more rural-to-urban migration; however, these effects are modest. A one standard deviation increase in policy enforcement (measured by excess fertility, as mentioned in the fourth approach presented previously) leads to a 0.015 percentage point higher divorce rate, a 0.12 percentage point higher male labor force participation rate, and a 0.8 percentage point higher rural-to-urban migration rate. The results suggest that lower birth rates may have some unintended consequences that scholars and policymakers need to consider.

Another interesting phenomenon is the increased rate of twin births. When a couple is allowed one child, the only legitimate way to have two children is to give birth to twins, which is largely out of the control of the couple. For those who do not give birth to twins, an alternative is to report fake twins, that is, to register two consecutive siblings as twins. Interestingly, the rate of twin births reported in population censuses more than doubled between the late 1960s and the early 2000s, from 3.5 to 7.5 per 1,000 births. A recent study suggests that at least one-third of the increase in twins since the 1970s can be explained by the OCP [11] . Since couples can intentionally have twin births to bypass the OCP (i.e. by reporting fake twins or taking fertility drugs to have multiple births), the distribution of reported twins in China may not be random.

Limitations and gaps

One limitation of studying the impact of the OCP may be the measures employed. Because this policy was implemented essentially at once across the entire country, little variation exists in the timing. Because of this, many scholars have relied on the differential treatment of Han and minority ethnicities to evaluate the policy’s effects. However, this is not a perfect approach because different characteristics across the ethnicities may be correlated with the time trends, thereby biasing the results.

In addition, local governments usually had a “policy package” when implementing the OCP, which often included different penalties for illegal births for people from different backgrounds. For example, when an illegal birth is observed, those with party membership may lose it, and those hired by the public sector or collective firms may lose their jobs. These measures may go hand in hand with policy fines, but they are hard to quantify.

Furthermore, since the literature relates behavior response to social welfare, economists usually examine individuals’ behavioral responses to government policies to estimate the corresponding social welfare loss. However, no study has so far examined the corresponding welfare loss for fertility policies. To do this, researchers may need to build up a model and then analyze rich data sets to provide relevant empirical evidence. However, the difficulty in this regard originates from the lack of official documentation or details regarding the implementation of China’s OCP.

Finally, the current literature on the OCP mainly investigates the simultaneous or short-term effects. Specifically, it compares how individual behaviors differ before and after the implementation of the policy. However, there is little evidence on the long-term or lagged effects of the OCP. Take the study from 2010 as an example, whose results suggest that women growing up under birth restrictions may have higher socio-economic status [12] . Considering this, the lower fertility expectations resulting from the OCP may lead to higher education, and this potentially has profound and long-lasting effects on productivity and economic growth. However, this is largely unknown in the current literature.

Summary and policy advice

As the largest social experiment in human history, the OCP has restricted the fertility of millions of couples in China for more than three decades. This article has reviewed outcomes presented in the literature about the OCP, with a focus on its intended and unintended consequences, including fertility, sex ratio, human capital, twin births, and interethnic marriages. The results suggest that the policy has had large and long-lasting impacts on many aspects of both the economy and society, though debates persist on certain topics. The current findings also provide possible directions for insightful future studies.

It is hard to conclude whether the OCP has been good or bad in general. It has curbed the potentially problematic population boom in China, though researchers disagree as to how much of that should be attributed to the OCP, and it has possibly increased human capital accumulation. But, it has also brought with it problems, such as an unbalanced sex ratio, increased crime, and individual dissatisfaction toward the government. Since 2010, the government has loosened the policy restrictions. In late 2013, China’s government started the “selective two child policy.” This policy allows couples to have two children if one member of the couple has no siblings. In November 2015, the government ended the OCP and started the “universal two child policy.” Although the OCP has now been terminated, there are many important questions that have yet to be answered. Until considerable further research is done, it is difficult to extrapolate lessons from China’s experience to inform future policy decisions.

Acknowledgments

The author thanks an anonymous referee and the IZA World of Labor editors for many helpful suggestions on earlier drafts. Previous work of the author contains a larger number of background references for the material presented here and has been used intensively in all major parts of this article [11] .

Competing interests

The IZA World of Labor project is committed to the IZA Guiding Principles of Research Integrity . The author declares to have observed these principles.

© Wei Huang

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One-Child Policy and Its Influence on China Essay

Introduction, background and concept of one-child policy, the effects of china’s one-child policy, populace growth, the sex ratio, rights to life, proportion of old age dependency, the future of the policy, works cited.

China’s one-tyke family strategy has affected the lives of almost a fourth of the world’s populace. The Chinese government guaranteed that it was a transient measure to move toward a little intentional family culture. Thus, we will analyze the influence of China’s one-tyke policy, its accomplishment, and recommendations. This paper will discuss why the approach was presented and how it is actualized. We will analyze the results of the arrangement about populace development, the proportion amongst men and women, and the proportion between grown-up kids and elderly guardians. Finally, we will examine the significance of the strategy in contemporary China. As China rose out of the social interruptions and monetary stagnation of the Cultural Revolution, its government dispatched market changes to revive the economy. In 1979, perceiving that populace control was vital to raise expectations for everyday comforts, the one-tyke family approach was presented (Kang and Wang 91). The one-child policy has exposed the challenges of human freedom. It is morally unsuitable to take a human life, be it by homicide, capital punishment, or premature birth. Numerous social orders acknowledged premature birth to safeguard the mental and social prosperity of the mother.

This strategy restricts family estimate, empowers a late marriage, childbearing, and the dividing of kids when second kids are allowed. Family spacing panel at neighborhood levels created immediate techniques to support the policy. However, the one-tyke principle applies to urban inhabitants and government workers (Hao 171). In rustic zones, a second child is permitted following five years, if the first is a woman. A third kid is authorized in some ethnic minorities and in remote, under-populated regions. Financial motivations for consistence, significant fines, seizure of property and loss of employment, were utilized to authorize the approach. The strategy depends on general access to contraception and premature birth. By implication, Eighty-seven for each penny of wedded women used contraception. Most women acknowledged the technique suggested by the family physician, which supported one-child policy (Hao 172). Dependence on long haul contraception kept the premature birth rate low (25 for every penny of Chinese ladies of regenerative age have had no less than one fetus removal, as contrasted 43 for each penny in the United States). Premature births are authorized when contraceptives are ineffective or when the pregnancy is not affirmed. However, Unattended and unsanctioned conveyances do happen.

In 1979, the Chinese government left with an aspiring system of business change taking after the financial stagnation of the Cultural Revolution. Sixty-six percent of the populace was under the age of 30 years, and the children of postwar America of the 1950s and 1960s were entering their regenerative years. The administration saw strict populace control as key to monetary change and a change in living standards. As a result, the Chinese government presented the one-kid family arrangement. The strategy comprises of an arrangement of directions administering the affirmed size of Chinese families. These controls incorporate limitations on family measure, late marriage, and childbearing, and the separating of kids (where second kids are allowed). Family-arranging advisory groups as common and regional levels devise immediate systems for execution. Despite its name, the one-kid principle applies to a minority of the populace; for urban occupants and government workers, the arrangement are upheld, with a couple of exemptions (Festini and de Martino 360). Special cases incorporate families in which the main kid has an inability or both guardians work in high-hazard occupations, (for example, mining) or are themselves from one-youngster families (in a few zones). In areas where 70 percent of the general population lives, a second child permitted following five years, yet this arrangement occasionally applies if the main youngster is a woman (an unmistakable affirmation of the conventional inclination for boys). The influence of China’s one-tyke policy affected the sex ratio and population growth. However, the policy increased abortion to astronomical heights.

The one-child policy is a standout amongst the most critical social approaches ever executed in China. The approach, set up in 1979, restricted couples to just having one tyke. The policy was influenced by China’s amazingly vast populace development, which was seen as a danger to the nation’s future monetary development and expectations for everyday comforts of the general population (Festini and de Martino 359). At the season of being actualized, China’s populace was around 970 million (Festini and de Martino 360), thus, it was the Chinese government’s objective to enforce populace development to keep the aggregate populace focused around 1.2 billion for the year 2000 (Hao 170). China’s aggregate populace was around 1.26 billion in 2000 (Hu 5), so the objective was accomplished, yet maybe was marginally higher than what the legislature estimated. For the arrangement to be effectively executed, the administration presented motivating forces so that the populace would follow the directions.

These impetuses have been monetary, including duties and fines for the individuals who do not go with the policy. For instance, families have favored access to lodging, social insurance and instruction (Festini and de Martino 368). There have been both positive and negative effects connected with the one-tyke policy in China. It has been effective in avoiding between 250 million and 300 million births (Festini and de Martino 370), and in addition, diminishing the aggregate ripeness rate (TFR) from 2.7 youngsters for every woman in 1980 to 1.7 in 2011 (Festini and de Martino 369). This figure in TFR has prompted the diminishing of the aggregate populace of China accordingly dodging a populace blast, keeping up monetary development, and enhancing expectation of everyday comforts. Nonetheless, there are worries that the current TFR that is underneath the substitution level of 2.1 may bring a different demographic circumstance. This low TFR may decrease to lower level, potentially prompting a populace decrease that supports ‘minimal low’ richness (TFR of 1.3 or beneath). By implication, there will be an absence of individuals in the working age populace and the prospect of a maturing populace (Kang and Wang 91). This would influence the reliance proportion of the nation and put gigantic weight on the administration to give monetary and social backing to the elderly populace.

A standout amongst the impacts of the one child policy has been China’s sex proportion and the “missing young ladies” marvel. China has encountered a skewed sex proportion for quite a while, before tyke policy was presented. This issue has been exacerbated subsequent to the presentation of the approach. In China, having male kids is favored over girls. This inclination is particularly present in rustic territories because male children are in charge of supporting relatives once they have achieved maturity. As a result, the child inclination has prompted an expanded skew in the sex proportion during childbirth. Prior to the strategy in 1979, the sex proportion was 115 boys per 96 girls marginally higher than the world sex proportion of 109 boys per 90 females. The amazingly skewed sex proportion in China has prompted the “missing young ladies” wonder, which means many young women are “lost” from China’s populace registers. There are four fundamental clarifications for this: female child murder, disregard, or relinquishment; underreporting of female births; reception of female kids; and sex-particular premature births (Riley 34). Abortion, which is the primary driver of China’s sex proportion, was an aftereffect of the policy. Through the presentation of ultrasound machines in the mid-1980s, Chinese couples could illicitly discover the sex of their tyke and after that could complete a fetus removal if their first kid was a female, making it workable for them to have a child (Kaiman14).

Lately, there have been arrangements with the Chinese government to unwind the policy. Notwithstanding, there is levelheaded discussion whether this will make a populace blast inside China. The monetary weight of having a kid has deflected numerous couples from having a second tyke; subsequently this unwinding of the arrangement might not affect the populace development of China. Consequently, numerous couples from provincial regions will probably have a second tyke as they depend more on their sons to bolster the family. There could even be a plausibility of the policy being suspended by 2020 (Kaiman14), however this will rely on upon future demographic patterns and if the legislature will surrender one of the greatest strategies ever presented in China.

At the point when the one-youngster approach was presented, the administration set an objective populace of 1.2 billion by the year 2000 (Kaiman16). The census count of 2000 puts the populace at 1.27 billion. The strategy itself influenced the diminishing in the ripeness rate. The most sensational abatement, in the rate really happened before the arrangement was enforced. Different interpretations have been advanced to clarify why 118 young men are conceived for every 101 young women conceived with sex-particular fetus removal picking up the amplest acknowledgment. Indeed, even in other Asian nations without populace control projects, for example, South Korea and Taiwan, the solid social inclination for children joined the entrance to cut edge innovations, for example, ultrasound has brought about expanded male sex proportions during childbirth. In the United States, some Chinese outsiders utilized sex fetus removal to sustain the male child ratio. Sex-selection birth includes couples picking premature birth if the embryo is observed to be a female tyke. In June of 2006, the Chinese governing body declined to case, sex-selection premature births a wrongdoing, though abortion is illegal. Since sex-premature births abuse, family control strategy, the legislature has guaranteed to rebuff the policy (Kaiman 4).

The social weight applied by the one-kid strategy has influenced the rate at which guardians surrender undesirable youngsters in state-supported housing, from which thousands are embraced both universally and by Chinese guardians. The guardians offered them up for formal or casual selection. A greater part of youngsters who experienced formal selection in China in the late 1980’s was young women, which has increased in the recent survey. The acts of receiving undesirable young women are steady with both the child inclination of numerous Chinese couples.

The impact of the strategy on the sex proportion has gotten much consideration. The sex proportion during childbirth, characterized as the extent of male births to female ranged from 1.03 to 1.07 in industrialized countries. There has been an enduring increment in the reported sex proportion, from 1.08 in 1979, 1.12 in 1988, to 1.19 in 2001. Thus, the policy supported sex-selection ratios in China (Hesketh and Xing 1172). By implication, parents abort a female fetus, which they consider a liability to family stability. This assumption has been widely criticized by human rights institutions (Hesketh and Xing 1173). What transpires the missing young women involves hypothesis. Sex-fetus removal after ultrasonography without a doubt represents a decrease in female births. Actual figures are difficult to get, because sex-premature birth is illicit and not documented (Hesketh and Xing 1171). Consequently, non-registration of female birth adds to the sex-proportion gap. A survey completed in three areas found a typical sex proportion in the under-14 age bunch, with the genuine number of young women surpassing the number enlisted by 22 percent (Hesketh and Xing 1173). Although child murders of young women are extremely uncommon now, fewer treatments of female newborn are uncommon.

Numerous human rights institutions have scrutinized the “One-Child Policy”. They considered the one-youngster approach is against the human right of proliferation. Reactions mostly concentrate on the very conceivable social issues, for example, the “One-Two-Four” issue, while perceiving the significance of having such an approach for the nation. Identified with this feedback are sure the side-outcomes that are ascribed to the one-kid strategy, including the utilization of sex-selection birth. Birth proponents argue that the one-tyke strategy is an infringement of human rights. Consequently, practices purportedly used to actualize this arrangement are illegal. China has been blamed for meeting its populace prerequisites through the gift, intimidation, constrained disinfection, constrained premature birth, and child murder, with most reports originated from rustic zones (Hesketh and Xing 1173). An online report revealed that in 2005, share of 20,000 constrained premature births in Guangdong province was set because of the reported carelessness of the one-tyke approach (Hesketh and Xing 1175). The exertion included utilizing compact ultrasound gadgets to find premature birth applicants. The report stated that women as far along as 8.5 months pregnant were compelled to prematurely end by infusion of saline arrangement into the womb. Because of the procedure, the mother is exposed to extraordinary mental and physical torment. Thus, utilization of constrained disinfection and controlled birth is in disagreement with formally expressed approaches and perspective on China as indicated by government authorities (Susan 165).

It is obscure how regular child murder is in China, however, government authorities say that it is uncommon. There are stories of guardians executing their female newborn in remote and country regions for various reasons. Beside evasion of the punishments and confinements of the state prevention arrangement, the main drivers of child murder, particularly for infant, girls, would be needed in rural China alongside the customary inclination for boys. Thus, the Chinese government has recognized the unfortunate social outcomes of this sex lopsidedness. The deficiency of girls has expanded mental issues and social conduct among men. Although the one-kid arrangement has been reprimanded for the high sex proportion, it is one contributory variable. There was a high sex proportion in China in the 1930s and 1940s, because of child murder of girls, and afterward the proportion declined in the years after the Communist Revolution of 1949. However, sex-fetus removal would proceed at a lower rate without the one-child policy.

The quick abatement in the birth rate, joined steady or enhance future, has prompted an expanding extent of elderly individuals and an increment in the proportion between elderly guardians and grown-up children. The rate of the populace beyond 65 is at par with adolescents. Although these figures are lower than those in industrialized regions are, the absence of sufficient annuity scope in China implies that money related reliance on posterity is still fundamental for 65 percent of elderly people. Pension scope is accessible to those utilized in the administration part and extensive organizations. This issue has been named the “four-to-one” wonder, implying that expanding quantities of couples will be in charge of the consideration of one youngster and four guardians. Activities are under an approach to enhance access to government benefits for private annuities trying to diminish the weight of the 4:2:1 phenomenon.

The Chinese government is confronting a critical test: the need to adjust the human right of proliferation with populace development. Thus, the unwinding strategy must be tailored to align with the rights to life. There is presently great proof that China is turning into a little family culture. Thus, government institutions must abolish the policy to avoid workforce shortage. Perceiving that ultrasonography encourages sex premature birth, non-administrative associations effectively campaigned to sanction the law. Improving the financial and social estimation of women will require creative projects. Enhanced instruction and pay employment offer in parental property will add to the improved status of women.

Indeed, even the tyrant legislature of China must make concessions to the social male inclination in permitting most of its populace to the second tyke when the first is a young woman. Along these lines, while sex determination is illicit in China, a high extent of kids (particularly the second youngster) is young men demonstrating that the prohibition on fetus removal is not extremely successful. Consequently, the Chinese government has declared “particular strategies for young women in medical services, training, and income. We have seen from China’s case that laws influencing societal states of mind are hard to uphold. In India, the two-tyke strategy has been implemented by denying employments to those with more than two kids. The punishments have influenced primarily those from the lower position and class while the upper ranks and classes have the capacity to maintain a strategic distance (Barry 122).

The one-child policy has exposed the challenges of human freedom. It is morally unsuitable to take a human life, be it by homicide, capital punishment, or premature birth. Numerous social orders acknowledged premature birth to safeguard the mental and social prosperity of the mother. Women activists have battled long and difficult to make fetus removal lawful and effectively accessible to women. By implication, women must have the supreme right to life (Barry 134). The monstrous movement to urban zones could clear much of the ills ascribed to sexual irregularity in China (Hu 6). A few guardians may over-enjoy their exclusive tyke creating adolesenct issues.. Since the 1990s, a few people have stressed that this will bring about a higher propensity toward poor social correspondence and participation abilities among children. However, no social studies have researched the proportion of these over-reveled kids and to what degree they are reveled. With the original of youngsters conceived under the strategy, achieving adulthood, such stresses are reduced.

Barry, Naughton. The Chinese Economy: Transitions and Growth , Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2007. Print.

Festini, Filippo, and de Martino, Matiq. “Twenty Five Years of the One Child Family Policy in China.” Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health 58.1 (2004): 358-373. Print.

Hao, Yuri. “China’s 1.2 Billion Target for the Year 2000: ‘Within’ or ‘Beyond’?” The Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs 19.20 (1988): 165-183.

Hesketh, Therese, and Xing, Zhu. “The Effect of China’s One-Child Family Policy After 25 Years.” The New England Journal of Medicine 353.11 (2005): 1171-1176.

Hu, Huiting 2002, Family Planning Law and China’s Birth Control Situation . Web.

Kaiman, Jonathan 2013, China’s One-Child Policy to be Relaxed as Part of Reforms Package The Guardian . Web.

Kaiman, Jonathan, 2014 Time Running Out for China’s One-Child Policy after Three Decades the Guardian . Web.

Kang, Cun, and Wang, Yuri 2003, “Sex Ratio at Birth In: Theses Collection of 2001.” National Family Planning and Reproductive Health Survey 23.1 (2003): 88-98.Print.

Riley, Nancy. “China’s Population: New Trends and Challenges.” Population Journal 60.2 (2004): 14-45.

Susan, Greenhalgh. “Science, Modernity, and the Making of China’s One-Child Policy.” Population and Development Review 29.1 (2003): 163-196. Print.

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• Demographics

Here’s How China’s One-Child Policy Started in the First Place

W ith China’s one-child policy ending on Thursday after more than three decades, looking back to when—and why—the strict policy was first implemented shows us how China’s demographics have shifted in critical ways.

In the 1970s, many countries around the world were worried about population growth , but China, with its combination of a particularly large population and a powerful government, took an extreme approach to the problem. The country initially ran a successful birth control campaign under the slogan “Late, Long and Few,” which cut population growth by half between 1970 and 1976. But, as the decade came to an end, that drop leveled off and the nation was still facing food shortages and fear of a repeat of the devastating famine that killed some 30 million people by 1962.

In 1979, the Chinese government introduced a policy requiring couples from China’s ethnic Han majority to limit themselves to one child. The official start of implementation came in 1980, with an open letter issued by the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China. The letter outlined the population pressure on the country and set out a goal of curbing population growth, bringing the nation’s total below 1.2 billion at the end of the 20th century. As reports from the time noted , the nation’s 38 million Communist Party members were told to use “patient and painstaking persuasion” to teach the rest of the population how important it was to practice family planning.

See the Official Flag Raising for China’s National Day

To enforce the law, the Chinese government could fine couples for having another child without a permit. The law also incentivized single-child homes by offering longer maternity leave and other benefits to such families. Compliance with the law was seen as a revolutionary good for society; couples who abided by the mandate were awarded a “Certificate of Honor for Single-Child Parents.”

The policy was relaxed slightly in the mid-1980s, with the government allowing second children for some families in rural areas or offering exceptions for households in which both parents were themselves only children.

For a while, the unprecedented policy could be considered a success, at least in terms of population goals. As TIME’s Hannah Beech reported in 2013 :

The family-planning program, coupled with market reforms launched around the same time, is credited with catalyzing China’s modern transformation. With fewer bellies to feed, the government turned a hand-to-mouth society into the world’s second largest economy. Although many families, especially those in the countryside, are exempted from the one-child maximum, Chinese women bear, on average, about 1.5 children, compared with about 6 in the late 1960s.

But still, the law has been controversial since its inception, as it contributed to concerns over forced abortions and sterilization, and a gender imbalance resulting from female infanticide.

Now as China faces an aging and shrinking population rather than an exploding one, the government has decided to end the controversial policy.

Read TIME’s take on the one-child policy’s effects from 1987, here in the TIME Vault: Bringing Up Baby, One by One

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Write to Tessa Berenson at [email protected]

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China’s One Child Policy and Its Effect on Economy, Family, and Society

Possible solutions.

China is considered to be one of the most populated countries in the world. Moreover, the country has been holding the world’s leading position in this field for a long time. Therefore, the issue of Chinese demographic policy is one of the most important. The problems that are associated with the size of the population are especially acute in this country. In fact, at this stage of economic and demographic development, it is impossible to raise living standards without solving these issues.

In recent years, there have been numerous heated discussions among the expert community and in the Chinese media about the apparent need of revising the “one family – one child” policy. In addition, researchers also discuss the possible consequences for the country’s development in connection with the abolition of strict birth control. Economists and demographers expressed particular concerns about the consequences of this policy, which has lasted for almost forty years. According to researchers, “the policies have a far-reaching impact on population size, fertility rate, sex ratio, age structure, family size” (Wang, 2017, p. 21). As a result, China has decided to change its demographic policy and allow each married couple to have two children.

First of all, before discussing the consequences, it is important to review the history of that rule. The Chinese government was forced to legally limit family size in the 1970s when it became clear that vast numbers of people were overwhelming the country’s land, water, and energy resources. This demographic policy was called “one family – one child,” or just “one child,” policy. The Chinese leadership associated the fulfillment of socio-economic and political tasks with limiting the growth of a huge population because taking care of such a big population was difficult. In order to limit population growth, the country began to implement new family-planning rules from the mid-1960s with an ever-increasing tightening of it.

At the beginning, the authorities allowed families to have three children. Then, after a few years, parents were offered to have no more than two children, and, from the beginning of the 1980s, they began to consider an exemplary family with one child. City streets were replete with slogans which declared that having an only child is better for the family. Children in big cities, where this policy was carried out most successfully, were dressed in good clothes and surrounded by attention and care. Families with one child also received benefits, such as the right to priority housing, free maintenance for a child in a kindergarten, advantages in admission to universities, and more.

Families in rural areas with one child were allowed to increase the size of the allocated household land. For parents with two or more children, a number of different restrictions were implemented in a number of areas. For example, after the birth of a second child, parents were required to return the bonus that was paid to them monthly as a family with one child. In addition, they were forced to pay a fine, the amount of which depended on income and residences ranged from a few hundred to several thousand Yuan. The following figure how the fertility rate changed during those years.

Among the unusual family planning measures was the promotion of late marriage. Officially, the age of marriage for women was 20 years, for men it was 22 years. However, additional restrictions were introduced by the government; for example, it was strictly forbidden to create a family for students up to the threat of expelling from the institute. Nevertheless, in matters of marriage, China has gradually become an increasingly modern country. For thousands of years marriages in China were concluded by agreement between parents. Divorces ceased to be a rarity, but their share was significantly lower than in Western countries since divorce is considered a shame for the Chinese people. It should also be noted that the slogan “One family – one child” was carried out the country while taking into account local conditions and national characteristics. Thus, in areas inhabited by national minorities, the number of children could not be limited.

Nevertheless, this policy has a number of negative consequences regarding family matters. The imbalance in the sex ratio forms is one of those negative social phenomena. The following graph demonstrates how the balance between the male and female population significantly increased due to this rule. The reason for such disparity is that it was more convenient to have a male child, rather than to have a female child. Such belief was particularly popular due to sexism in the Chinese community. Parents were convinced that a son is more likely to take care of them when they will grow old, while a daughter will be taking care of her own family. For this reason, most of female fetuses were aborted, which lead to an imbalanced sex ratio.

The reason for this is that such disparity contributes to the growth of the illegal market for sexual services, women and children trafficking, and the spread of AIDS. This demographic imbalance seriously damages the psychological health of young men, condemns them to search for brides in neighboring states (). Moreover, it generates a number of different mental problems connected with insecurity, stress, and suicidal moods, which can also lead to an increase in sexual crimes.

In Chinese society, a large number of single young men who came from families as an only child has formed a group that, for objective reasons, has limited opportunities to satisfy their need for a family. In addition, they also cannot satisfy the basic needs of the individual for love and belonging. The inability to satisfy these needs, as a rule, leads to maladjustment, aggressiveness, and unpredictability of social behavior. All of these trends create conditions for social destabilization and pose a certain threat to social security.

Furthermore, this policy also created changes in financial condition of families. On the one hand, it became easier for families to support their children. According to researchers, “singleton children received more financial investment in their education than their non-singleton counterparts; and parents spent less time supervising girls’ academic work in the presence of male siblings” (Hu & Shi, 2020, p. 381). However, under current conditions, every single child in a Chinese family is still forced to support their parents and two pairs of paternal and maternal grandparents. This is objectively an extraordinary burden for an individual who builds their own life and marriage in difficult economic conditions.

This also creates an apparent problem because for one adult, it would be difficult to support not only his own wife and children, but both parents as well. From this issue, a need for changes in policies regarding government support arises. The legislative consolidation of the obligations of adult children to their parents testifies to the urgency of the problems of financial help, as well as psychological support for elderly citizens. The disregard of this problem can lead to the increase of disrespectful and cruel treatment of elderly relatives.

In less than 40 years, as a result of effective birth control in China, an accelerated demographic transition from the traditional model of population reproduction took place. From high fertility and mortality rates, it was changed to a modern model characterized by low fertility and mortality, low population growth. In addition, the changes occurred regarding the structure of the population in favor of older age groups and a gradual reduction in the share of the working-age population.

At first, the birth control policy and the resulting drop in the demographic burden have contributed greatly to China’s rapid economic growth. There are a number of reasons for these positive changes, however, they were short-lived. The labor market was filled with young women who were no longer busy giving birth and raising children. The maintenance of a single-child family required less funds than a family with many children. Therefore, the requirements for higher wages were not aggravated, and labor remained cheap. The state freed itself from the obligation to take care of the education and employment of the second and subsequent children. As a result, it became possible to increase the share of savings and investment. In the early 2010s, the demographic burden reached its minimum, and the growth in the proportion of the elderly in China’s population

has already begun. The following figure demonstrates how labor forces were distributed among the population.

The previous graph demonstrates how the working age was transformed due to the one-child policy. This result was produced by the researchers’ own calculation “based on the 1982 Population Census and mini-census in 2005 of China” (Wang et al., 2017, p. 52). From this outcome, one can see that a significant amount of old people works in agriculture in recent years. Wang (2017) also indicated that “labor markets may encounter a shortage in the labor force if the industrial structure fails to transform properly” (p. 64). In addition to this alarming trend, there is also a steady increase in the population of people over 60 years old.

There is no doubt that this increase is also becoming a problem for the government for several reasons. The rapidly aging society expects from the state the creation of specialized services focused on the specific needs of this age group. In addition, the elderly also need the development and implementation of new technologies of social support. Researchers note that the “significantly accelerated the advent of an aging society, radically altered the structure of the population, and made eldercare a more challenging task” (Nie, 2016, p. 364). Aging also affects the standard of living of older people, which leads to an increase in the number of the poor.

The sharp decline in living standards after 60 is associated with a drop in income due to retirement status. As was stated above, one-child policy also restricts the opportunities for the elderly to get support by their children. As researchers state, “such policy exogenously reduces the availability of talented heirs, which in turn greatly lowers within-family successions and results in discontinuity of family firms since most family firms rely on within-family succession” (Cao et al., 2015, p. 328). Speaking about solving the problem of population aging in China, it should be emphasized that a significant part of the research and discussion on this issue is focused on the material aspects faced by older people. It includes the level and equity of retirement allowance, the cost and availability of medical and nursing services, financial support that should be provided to them by the state, and adult children. Much less attention is paid to the low quality of their life, the problem of emotional and social assistance faced by representatives of older age groups.

The problem of providing a high-quality, prosperous living conditions for the older age groups must be addressed in a comprehensive manner. The government has already rejected the one-child policy; however, its consequences will still be present for several decades. Therefore, China’s traditional family care system for the elderly should eventually be replaced by social insurance for old age, as well as family care and community-based, charitable, and commercial services. The creation of such an innovative model is in the interests of both the population and the state. The reason for this is that it meets the needs of older people and contributes to the preservation of social stability and the creation of a harmonious society.

Due to the decision to implement a one-child policy, there is still a number of negative trends in the structure of China’s population. For this reason, changes in this rule policy is considered to be timely and vital. As a result of the implementation of new attitudes in family planning in the long term, the size of the working-age population will stabilize, and the aging rate will slow down. Moreover, the age and sex structure of the Chinese population will also improve and be more equal. The adjustment of family planning policy will certainly play a positive role in putting the Chinese economy towards more productive development. It will also create objective grounds for reducing its traditionally high savings rate and stimulating the growth of markets for goods and services. All these interventions will have a positive impact on the Chinese economy and give a new impulse to its growth in the long term.

The Chinese experience of family planning and solving the problem of aging of the population is an important contribution to the research about the demographic situation in the world. For this reason, it is of particular interest for the leaders of developing countries, where the problem of improving the quality of life of older people does not lose its relevance. The socio-economic development of such a populated country as China can give rise to new problems and contradictions that are difficult to predict at this stage. That is why the demographic situation and the acute social problems associated with it, the successes and failures of the Chinese leadership require constant monitoring and a scientific analysis.

Cao, J., Cumming, D., & Wang, X. (2015). One-child policy and family firms in China. Journal of Corporate Finance , 33 , 317-329. 

Hu, Y., & Shi, X. (2020). The impact of China’s one-child policy on intergenerational and gender relations. Contemporary Social Science , 15 (3), 360-377. 

Loh, C., & Remick, E. J. (2015). China’s skewed sex ratio and the one-child policy . The China Quarterly , 222 , 295-319. 

Nie, J. B. (2016). Erosion of eldercare in China: A socio-ethical inquiry in aging, elderly suicide and the government’s responsibilities in the context of the one-child policy. Ageing International , 41 (4), 350-365. 

Wang, F., Zhao, L., & Zhao, Z. (2017). China’s family planning policies and their labor market consequences. Journal of Population Economics , 30 (1), 31-68. 

Whyte, M. K., Feng, W., & Cai, Y. (2015). Challenging myths about China’s one-child policy. The China Journal , (74), 144-159. 

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StudyCorgi. (2022, February 26). China’s One Child Policy and Its Effect on Economy, Family, and Society. https://studycorgi.com/chinas-one-child-policy-and-its-effect-on-economy-family-and-society/

"China’s One Child Policy and Its Effect on Economy, Family, and Society." StudyCorgi , 26 Feb. 2022, studycorgi.com/chinas-one-child-policy-and-its-effect-on-economy-family-and-society/.

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1. StudyCorgi . "China’s One Child Policy and Its Effect on Economy, Family, and Society." February 26, 2022. https://studycorgi.com/chinas-one-child-policy-and-its-effect-on-economy-family-and-society/.

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StudyCorgi . "China’s One Child Policy and Its Effect on Economy, Family, and Society." February 26, 2022. https://studycorgi.com/chinas-one-child-policy-and-its-effect-on-economy-family-and-society/.

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One Child Essay Questions

By torey hayden, essay questions.

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Why did Torey Hayden write this book about her time with Sheila?

Hayden wrote the book not only to show the positive qualities in herself but also those that she was able to bring forth in Sheila and all of the other member of her class. Mostly written to portray important themes, the book was published to provide an inspiration to all of its readers. One important theme in the novel is empathy, and it is shown by Torey through all of the time she spends doing positive things for her patients. A unique autobiography, One Child expresses important details that not everyone in today's world understands.

What is the purpose of the author adding in the scene where Torey and Sheila dress each other's hair?

The event itself isn't that important, but it is a stepping stone to the success that Sheila will see later in the novel. Before this event, Sheila hasn't opened up as much, and after it she seems to be more like a "normal child" and shows signs of mental growth. Although it isn't important in the whole scheme of the novel, it is an integral part of illustrating it's important themes.

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One Child Questions and Answers

The Question and Answer section for One Child is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel.

One Child by Torrey Hayden

Torey decides to put on a Mother's Day program in May.

One child quotes questions for first 10 chapters.

Sorry, this is only a short answer space.

question about sheila

Like the other children, Sheila is developmentally delayed and has not been labeled. Unlike the other children, Sheila is tough, violent, and unpredictable.

Study Guide for One Child

One Child study guide contains a biography of Torey Hayden, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

• About One Child
• One Child Summary
• Character List

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Israel’s Deadly Airstrike on the World Central Kitchen

The story behind the pioneering aid group and how it mistakenly came under attack..

From “The New York Times,” I’m Michael Barbaro. This is “The Daily.”

The Israeli airstrike that killed seven aid workers delivering food in Gaza has touched off outrage and condemnations from across the world. Today, Kim Severson on the pioneering relief crew at the center of the story, and Adam Rasgon on what we’re learning about the deadly attack on the group’s workers. It’s Thursday, April 4.

Kim, can you tell us about the World Central Kitchen?

World Central Kitchen started as a little idea in Chef José Andrés’ head. He was in Haiti with some other folks, trying to do earthquake relief in 2010. And his idea at that point was to teach Haitians to cook and to use solar stoves and ways for people to feed themselves, because the infrastructure was gone.

And he was cooking with some Haitians in one of the camps, and they were showing him how to cook beans the Haitian way. You sort of smash them and make them a little creamy. And it occurred to him that there was something so comforting for those folks to eat food that was from their culture that tasted good to them. You know, if you’re having a really hard time, what makes you feel good is comfort food, right? And warm comfort food.

So that moment in the camp really was the seed of this idea. It planted this notion in José Andrés’ mind, and that notion eventually became World Central Kitchen.

And for those who don’t know, Kim, who exactly is Chef José Andrés?

José Andrés is a Spanish chef who cooked under some of the Spanish molecular gastronomy greats, came to America, really made his bones in Washington, DC, with some avant-garde food, but also started to expand and cook tapas, cook Mexican food. He’s got about 40 restaurants now.

Yeah. And he’s got a great Spanish restaurant in New York. He’s got restaurants in DC, restaurants in Miami.

Come with me to the kitchen. Don’t be shy.

He’s also become a big TV personality.

Chef, are you going to put the lobster in the pot with the potatoes?

We’re going to leave the potatoes in.

Leave the potatoes in!

He’s one of the most charismatic people I’ve ever been around in the food world.

He’s very much the touchstone of what people want their celebrity chefs to be.

So how does he go from being all those things you just described, to being on the ground, making local comfort food for Haitians? And how does this all go from an idea that that would be a good idea, to this much bigger, full-fledged humanitarian organization?

So he started to realize that giving people food in disaster zones was a thing that was really powerful. He helped feed people after Hurricane Sandy, and he realized that he could get local chefs who all wanted to help and somehow harness that power. But the idea really became set when he went to Houston in 2017 to help after Hurricane Harvey.

And that’s when he saw that getting local chefs to tap into their resources, borrowing kitchens, using ingredients that chefs might have had on hand or are spoiling in the fridge because the power is out and all these restaurants needed something to do with all this food before it rotted — harnessing all that and putting it together and giving people well-cooked, delicious — at least as delicious as it can be in a disaster zone — that’s when World Central Kitchen as we know it today sort of emerged as a fully formed concept.

The first pictures now coming in from Puerto Rico after taking a direct hit — Hurricane Maria slamming into the island. And as you heard, one official saying the island is destroyed.

Shortly after that, he flew to Puerto Rico, where Hurricane Maria had pretty much left the entire island without water and in darkness.

He flew in on one of the first commercial jets that went back in. He got a couple of his chef buddies whose kitchens were closed, and they just decided to start cooking. They were basically just serving pots of stew, chicken stew, in front of the restaurants.

The lines got longer. And of course, chefs are a really specific kind of creature. They really like to help their community. They’re really about feeding people.

So all the people who were chefs or cooks on the ground in Puerto Rico who could wanted to help. And you had all these chefs in the States who wanted to fly down and help if they could, too. So you had this constant flow of chefs coming in and out. That’s when I went down and followed him around for about a week.

And what did you see?

Well, one of the most striking things was his ability to get food to remote places in ways the Salvation Army couldn’t and other government agencies that were on the ground couldn’t. You know, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, FEMA, doesn’t deliver food. It contracts with people to deliver food.

So you have all these steps of bureaucracy you have to go through to get those contracts. And then, FEMA says you have to have a bottle of water and this and that in those boxes. There’s a lot of structure to be able to meet the rules and regulations of FEMA.

So José doesn’t really care about rules and regulations very much. So he just got his troops together and figured out where people needed food. He had this big paper map he’d carry around and lay out. And he had a Sharpie, and he’d circle villages where he’d heard people needed food or where a bridge was out.

And then he would dispatch people to get the food there. Now, how are you going to do that? He was staying in a hotel where some National Guard and military police were staying to go patrol areas to make sure they were safe. He would tuck his big aluminum pans of food into the back of those guys’ cars, and say, Could you stop and drop these off at this church?

During that time in Puerto Rico, he funded a lot of it off of his own credit cards or with cash. And then he’s on the phone with people like the president of Goya or his golf buddies who are well-connected, saying, hey, we need some money. Can you send some money for this? Can you send some money for that?

So he just developed this network, almost overnight. I mean, he is very much a general in the field. He wears this Orvis fishing vest, has cigars in one pocket, money in the other. And he just sets out to feed people.

And there were deliveries that were as simple as he and a couple of folks taking plastic bags with food and wading through a flooded parking lot to an apartment building where an older person had been stuck for a few days and couldn’t get out, to driving up to a community that had been cut off. There was a church that was trying to distribute food.

We drive through this little mountain road and get to this church. We start unloading the food, and the congregation is inside the church. José comes in, and the pastor thanks him so much. And the 20 people or so who are there gather around José, and they begin praying.

And he puts his head down. He’s a Catholic. He’s a man who prays. He puts his head down. He’s in the middle of these folks, and he starts to pray with them. And then, pulls out his map, circles another spot, and the group is off to the next place.

And when Russia invades Ukraine, he immediately decided it was time for World Central Kitchen to step into a war zone. You know, so many people needed to eat. So many Ukrainians were crossing the border into Poland.

There are refugees in several countries surrounding Ukraine. So a lot of the work that they did was feeding the refugees. They set up big operations around train stations, places where refugees were coming, and then they were able to get into cities.

One of their operations did get hit with some armaments early on. Nobody was hurt badly. But I think that was the first time that they realized this was an actually more dangerous situation than perhaps going in after there’s been an earthquake.

But the other thing that really made a difference here is, José Andrés and World Central Kitchen would broadcast on social media, live from the kitchens. In the beginning, he’d be holding up his phone and saying, we put out 3 million meals for the people of Puerto Rico, chefs for Puerto Rico. It was very infectious.

And now, one of the standard operating procedures for people who are in the World Central Kitchens is to hold up the phone like that — you can see the kitchen, busy in the back — and talk about how many meals they’ve served. They have these kind of wild meal counts, which one presumes are pretty accurate. But they’re like, we served 320,000 meals this morning to the people of Lviv.

I mean, that scale seems important to note. This is not the kind of work that feeds a few people and a few towns. When you’re talking about 300,000 meals in a morning, you’re talking about something that begins, it would seem, to rival the scope and the reach of the groups that we tend to think of as the most important in the disaster-relief world.

Absolutely. And the meals — there are lots and lots and lots of meals. But also, World Central Kitchen hires local cooks. They’ll hire food truck operators, who obviously have no work, and pay them to go out and deliver the meals. They’ll pay local cooks to come in and cook. That’s what they do with a lot of their donations, which is very different than other aid organizations. And this then helps the local economy. He’s trying to buy as much local food as he can. That keeps the economy going in the time of a disaster. So that’s a piece of his operation that is a little different than traditional aid operations.

So walk us up to October 7, when Hamas attacked Israel. What does Chef José Andrés and the World Kitchen do?

Well, he had had such impact in Ukraine. And I think the organization itself thought that they had the infrastructure to now take food into another war zone. Gaza, of course, was nothing like Ukraine. But World Central Kitchen shows up. They’re nimble. They start to connect with local chefs.

Right now, they have about 60 kitchens in the areas around Gaza, and they’ve hired about 400 Palestinians to help do that. But getting the food into Gaza became the difficulty.

How do you actually get the food into the Gaza Strip? Large amounts of food that require trucks? You’ve got to realize, getting food into Gaza right now requires going through Israeli checkpoints.

And that slows the operation down. You might get eight trucks a day in, and that is such a small amount of food. And this has been incredibly difficult for any aid operations.

So World Central Kitchen, playing on the experience that they had in a war zone and working with government entities and trying to coordinate permissions — they took that experience from Ukraine and were trying to apply it in the Gaza Strip. Now, they had worked for a long time with Israeli officials. They wanted to make sure that they could get their food in.

And they decided that the best way to do it would be to take food off of ships, get it in a warehouse, and then get that food into Gaza. It took a long time to pull those permissions through, but they were able to get the permissions they needed and set this system up, so they could move the food fairly quickly into North Gaza.

And once they get those permissions, how big a player do they become in Gaza?

World Central Kitchen became a kind of a fulcrum point for getting food aid in to Gaza in a way that a larger and more established humanitarian aid operations couldn’t, in part because they were small and nimble in their way. So the amount of food they were moving maybe wasn’t as large as some of the more established humanitarian aid organizations, but they had so much goodwill. They had so much logistical knowledge.

They were working with local Palestinians who knew the food systems and who understood how to get things in and out. So they were able to find a way to use a humanitarian corridor to have permissions from the Israeli government, to be able to move this food back and forth. And that’s always been the secret to World Central Kitchen — is incredibly nimble. So —

Just like in Puerto Rico, they seemed to win over just about everybody and do the seemingly impossible.

Right. And World Central Kitchen says they delivered 43 million meals to Gazans since the start of the war. And I don’t think there was any other group that could have pulled this off.

Hey, this is Zomi and Chef Olivier. We’re at the Deir al-Balah kitchen. And we’ve got the mise en place. Tell us a little bit about it, Chef.

And then, this caravan, this fairly efficient caravan of armored vehicles, labeled with World Central Kitchen logo on the roof, on the sides — the idea was they head on — this humanitarian quarter, they head on this road. The seven people who went all in vests — three of whom are security people from Great Britain — you have another World Central Kitchen employee who has handled operations in Asia, in Central America. She’s quite a veteran of the World Central Kitchen operation.

And you have a young man who someone told me was like the Michael Jordan of humanitarian aid, who hooked up with World Central Kitchen in Poland. He was a hospitality student and had just become an indispensable make-it-happen guy. And you have a Palestinian guy who’s 25, a driver.

So this is the team. They have all the clearances. They have the well-marked vehicles. It seemed like a very simple, surgical kind of operation. And of course, now, as we know, it was anything but that.

After the break, my colleague Adam Rasgon on what happened to the World Central Kitchen workers in that caravan. We’ll be right back.

So Adam, what ends up happening to this convoy that our colleague Kim Severson just described from World Central Kitchen?

So what we know is that members of the World Central Kitchen had been at a warehouse in Deir al-Balah in the Central Gaza Strip. They had just unloaded about 100 tons of food aid that had been brought via a maritime route to the coast of the Gaza Strip. When they departed the warehouse, they were in three cars.

Two of the cars were armored cars, and one was a soft-skinned car, according to the organization. When the cars reached the coastal road, known as Al Rashid Street, they started to make their way south.

And what do we know about how much the World Central Kitchen would have told the Israeli military about their plans to be on this road?

Yeah. So the World Central Kitchen said that its movements were coordinated. And in military speak or in technical speak, people often refer to this as deconfliction. So basically, this process is something that not only the World Central Kitchen but the UN, telecommunications companies going out to repair damaged telecommunications infrastructure, others would use, where they basically provide the Israeli military with information about the people who are traveling — their ID numbers, their names, the license plate numbers of the cars they’ll be traveling in.

They’ll sort of explain where their destination is. And the general process is that the Israelis will then come back to them and say, you’re approved to travel from this time, and you can take this specific route.

And do we know if that happened? If the IDF said, you’re approved, use this route on this night?

So we heard from the World Central Kitchen that they did receive this approval. And the military hasn’t come out and said that it wasn’t approved. So I think it’s fair to assume that their movements were coordinated and de-conflicted.

OK. So what happens as this seemingly pre-approved and coordinated convoy trip is making this leg of the journey?

They started to make their way south towards Rafah. And the three cars suddenly came under fire. The Israeli army unleashes powerful and devastating strikes on the three cars in the convoy, most likely from a drone. The strikes rip through the cars, killing everyone inside.

Shortly thereafter, ambulances from the Palestine Red Crescent are dispatched to the location. They retrieve the dead bodies.

They bring those bodies to a hospital. And at the hospital, the bodies are laid out, and journalists start to report to the world that indeed, five members of the World Central Kitchen staff have been killed. And the Palestine Red Crescent teams were continuing to search for other bodies and eventually brought back two more bodies to the hospital for a total of seven people killed in these airstrikes.

And when the sun comes up, what does it end up looking like — the scene of these struck trucks from this convoy?

So early in the morning when the sun comes up, a number of Palestinian journalists headed out to the coastal road and started taking pictures and videos. And I received a series of videos from one of the reporters that I was in touch with, essentially showing three cars, all heavily damaged. One had a World Central Kitchen logo on top of it, with a gaping hole in the middle of the roof.

A second car was completely charred. You could barely recognize the structure of the car. The inside of it had been completely charred, and the front smashed.

And do we know if the strike on this convoy was the only strike happening in this area? In other words, is it possible that this convoy was caught in some kind of a crossfire or in the middle of a firefight, or does it appear that this was quite narrow, and was the Israeli army targeting these specific vehicles, whether or not they realized who was in it?

We don’t have any other indication that there was another strike on that road around that time.

What that suggests, of course, is that this convoy was targeted. Now, whether Israeli officials knew who was in it, whether they were aid workers, seems like a yet-unresolved question. But it does feel very clear that the trucks in this convoy were deliberately struck.

Yes. I do think the trucks in this convoy were deliberately struck.

What is the reaction to these airstrikes on this convoy and to the death of these aid workers?

Well, one of the first reactions is from the World Central kitchen’s founder, José Andrés.

Chef José Andrés, who founded World Central Kitchen, calling them angels.

He said he was heartbroken and grieving.

And adding the Israeli government needs to stop this indiscriminate killing.

And then, he accused Israel of using food as a weapon.

What I know is that we were targeted deliberately, nonstop, until everybody was dead in this convoy.

And he just seemed devastated and quite angry.

And so what is the reaction from not just World Central Kitchen, but from the rest of the world to this airstrike?

There’s, frankly, fury and outrage.

The White House says it is outraged by an Israeli airstrike that killed seven aid workers in Gaza, including one American.

President Biden, who has been becoming increasingly critical of Israel’s approach to this war — he came out and said that he was outraged and heartbroken.

Certainly sharper in tone than we have heard in the past. He says Israel has not done enough to protect aid workers trying to deliver desperately needed help to civilians. Incidents like yesterday’s simply should not happen. Israel also has not —

And we’re seeing similar outrage from foreign governments. The British Foreign Secretary David Cameron —

The dreadful events of the last two days are a moment when we should mourn the loss of these brave humanitarian workers.

— said that the airstrikes were completely unacceptable. And he called on Israel to explain how this happened and to make changes to ensure that aid workers could be safe.

So amid all this, what does Israel have to say about the attack — about how it happened, about why it happened?

The response from Israel this time was much different, compared to other controversial airstrikes on the Gaza Strip. Often, when we’re reporting on these issues, we’ll hear from the army that they’re investigating a given incident. It will take days, if not weeks, to receive updates on where that investigation stands.

There are instances where Israel does take responsibility for harming civilians, but it’s often rare. This time, the Prime Minister —

[NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]

— Benjamin Netanyahu comes out with a video message —

— saying that Israel had unintentionally harmed innocent civilians. And that was the first indication or public indication that Israel was going to take responsibility for what had happened.

The IDF works together closely with the World Central Kitchen and greatly appreciates the important work that they do.

We later heard from the military’s chief of staff. Herzi Halevi issued a video statement in English.

I want to be very clear the strike was not carried out with the intention of harming aid workers. It was a mistake that followed a misidentification.

And he said this mistake had come after a misidentification. He said it was in the middle of a war, in a very complex condition. But —

This incident was a grave mistake. We are sorry for the unintentional harm to the members of WCK.

He was clear that this shouldn’t have happened.

I want to talk about that statement, because it seems to suggest — that word, “misidentification”— that the Israeli army believed that somebody else was in this convoy, that it wasn’t a bunch of aid workers.

That’s possible, although it’s extremely vague and cryptic language that genuinely is difficult to understand. And it’s a question that us in the Jerusalem Bureau have been asking ourselves.

I’m curious if the Israeli government has said anything in all of its statements so far about whether it noticed these markings on these three cars in the convoy. Because that, I think, for so many people, stands out as making misidentification hard to understand. It seems like perhaps a random pickup truck could be misidentified as perhaps a vehicle being used by a Hamas militant. But a group of World Central Kitchen trucks with their name all over it, driving down a known aid corridor — that becomes harder to understand as misidentification.

Yeah, it’s an important question. And at this moment, we don’t know exactly what the Israeli reconnaissance drones could see, and whether or not they were able to see, in the darkness of the night, the markings of the World Central Kitchen on the cars. But what is clear is that when the cars were found in the morning, right there was the big emblazoned logo of the World Central Kitchen.

Mm-hmm. I’m curious how you think about the speed with which Israel came out and said it was in the wrong here. Because as you said, that’s not how Israel typically reacts to many of these situations. And that makes me think that it might have something to do with the nature of the aid group that was the target of these airstrikes — the World Central Kitchen — and its story.

I think it does have to do with this particular group. This is a group that’s led by a celebrity chef, very high-profile, who is gone around the world to conflict zones, disaster areas, to provide food aid. And I also think it has to do with the people who were killed, most of who were Western foreign aid workers. Frankly, I don’t think we would be having this conversation if a group of Palestinian aid workers had been killed.

Nor, perhaps, would we be having the reaction that we have had so far from the Israeli government.

I would agree with that.

Adam, at the end of the day, what is going to be the fallout from all of this for the people of Gaza? How do we think that this attack on World Central Kitchen is going to impact how food, medicine, aid is distributed there?

So the World Central Kitchen has said that it’s suspending its operations across Gaza. Because it essentially seems that they don’t feel they can safely operate there right now. And several ships that carried aid for the organization, which were sort of just on the coast — those ships ended up turning back to Cyprus, carrying more than 200 tons of aid.

So aid that was supposed to reach the people of Gaza is now leaving Gaza because of this attack.

Yes. And it’s also had a chilling effect. Another aid group, named INARA, has also suspended its operations in Gaza. And it seems that there is concern among humanitarians that other aid groups could follow.

So in a place where people are already suffering from severe hunger, poor sanitation, the spread of dangerous disease, this is only going to make the humanitarian situation, which is already dire, even worse.

Well, Adam, thank you very much. We appreciate it.

Thanks so much for having me.

We’ll be right back.

Here’s what else you need to know today. The magnitude-7.4 earthquake that struck Taiwan on Wednesday has killed nine people, injured more than 1,000, and touched off several landslides. It was Taiwan’s strongest quake in the past 25 years. But in a blessing for the island’s biggest cities, its epicenter was off the island’s east coast, relatively far from population centers like Taipei.

And the first patient to receive a kidney transplant from a genetically modified pig has fared so well that he was discharged from a Massachusetts hospital on Wednesday just two weeks after surgery. Two previous transplants from genetically modified pigs both failed. Doctors say the success of the latest surgery represents a major moment in medicine that, if replicated, could usher in a new era of organ transplantation.

Today’s episode was produced by Lynsea Garrison, Olivia Natt, and Carlos Prieto, with help from Asthaa Chaturvedi. It was edited by Marc Georges, with help from Paige Cowett, contains original music by Marion Lozano and Dan Powell, and was engineered by Chris Wood. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsverk of Wonderly.

That’s it for “The Daily.” I’m Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.

• April 5, 2024   •   29:11 An Engineering Experiment to Cool the Earth
• April 4, 2024   •   32:37 Israel’s Deadly Airstrike on the World Central Kitchen
• April 3, 2024   •   27:42 The Accidental Tax Cutter in Chief
• April 2, 2024   •   29:32 Kids Are Missing School at an Alarming Rate
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• March 29, 2024   •   48:42 Hamas Took Her, and Still Has Her Husband
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• March 27, 2024   •   28:06 Democrats’ Plan to Save the Republican House Speaker
• March 26, 2024   •   29:13 The United States vs. the iPhone
• March 25, 2024   •   25:59 A Terrorist Attack in Russia
• March 24, 2024   •   21:39 The Sunday Read: ‘My Goldendoodle Spent a Week at Some Luxury Dog ‘Hotels.’ I Tagged Along.’
• March 22, 2024   •   35:30 Chuck Schumer on His Campaign to Oust Israel’s Leader

Hosted by Michael Barbaro

Featuring Kim Severson and Adam Rasgon

Produced by Lynsea Garrison ,  Olivia Natt ,  Carlos Prieto and Asthaa Chaturvedi

Edited by Marc Georges and Paige Cowett

Original music by Dan Powell and Marion Lozano

Engineered by Chris Wood

Listen and follow The Daily Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music

The Israeli airstrike that killed seven workers delivering food in Gaza has touched off global outrage and condemnation.

Kim Severson, who covers food culture for The Times, discusses the World Central Kitchen, the aid group at the center of the story; and Adam Rasgon, who reports from Israel, explains what we know about the tragedy so far.

On today’s episode

Kim Severson , a food correspondent for The New York Times.

Adam Rasgon , an Israel correspondent for The New York Times.

Background reading

The relief convoy was hit just after workers had delivered tons of food .

José Andrés, the Spanish chef who founded World Central Kitchen, and his corps of cooks have become leaders in disaster aid .

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Kim Severson is an Atlanta-based reporter who covers the nation’s food culture and contributes to NYT Cooking . More about Kim Severson

Adam Rasgon reports from Israel for The Times's Jerusalem bureau. More about Adam Rasgon

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