China's One Child Policy

China's One Child Policy

1. china has the world's largest population

2. in 2010, its 1.3 billion people made up 20% of the entire population

3. it is estimated that by 2034, China will over take the USA as the worlds larget economy

4. Chinas Population Structure: The Chinese government introduced the One Child Policy, which was introduced in 1982. the Chinese government feared that rapid population growth would lead to poverty, so it ordered that every chinese family should only have one child

   • in 2010, China's fertility rate had dropped to 1.54.
     • China's annual population growth rate in 2012 was 0.49, this was because: - birth rates has dropped to 12.7 per 1000 - death rate was 6.9 per 1000 - political isolation from the rest of the world meant that migration had little effect

5. problems with enforcing the policy:

   • those who had more than child didn't receive benefits and got fined, the policy was keenly resisted in rural areas where it was tradition to have large families, in urban areas the policy was enforced strictly but was harder to control in rural areas, many people claim that women who get pregnant after having one child were forced to have an abortion and many women were forcibly sterilised, there is also evidence to support this claim.

6. impacts of the policy:

   • The birth rate in china has fallen since 1979 and the rate of population growth is now 0.7%. There have been negative impacts too - due to the fact couples can only have one child, they choose to have a boy, and so there is a high rate of infant mortality in girls. in 2000, it was reported that 90% of foetuses in china aborted were girls. This lead to a gender in-balance, today it is thought that men outnumber women by more than 60 million.

7. the One Child Policy has been relaxed slightly for certain situations in recent years.

   • for example, if a couple are both only children themselves they can have two children, if the parents are part of an ethnic minority group, if a parent has a disability, if they live in a rural area and are needed for work, and under certain criteria couples can have a second child after 5 years if the first is a girl.

8. long term implications of China's One Child Policy is an ageing population

   • chinas falling birth rate since the 1980's has led to a higher rate if elderly people in the population because of all the high birth rates before the policy was introduced
     • there are becoming fewer people of working age to support the dependent ageing population, meaning the government will also struggle to support them
       • couples are still becoming less likely to have more children to contradict this because they need to take care of elderly reatives