POPULATION CONTROL
Initially, China's
post-1949 leaders were ideologically disposed to view a large population as an
asset. But the liabilities of a large, rapidly growing population soon became
apparent. For one year, starting in August 1956, vigorous support was given to
the Ministry of Public Health's mass birth control efforts. These efforts,
however, had little impact on fertility. After the interval of the Great Leap Forward, Chinese leaders again saw rapid population growth as an
obstacle to development, and their interest in birth control revived. In the early 1960s,
schemes somewhat more muted than during the first campaign, emphasized the
virtues of late marriage. Birth control offices were set
up in the central government and some provincial-level governments in 1964. The
second campaign was particularly successful in the cities, where the birth rate
was cut in half during the 1963–66 period. The upheaval of the Cultural Revolution brought
the program to a halt, however.
In 1972 and 1973 the
party mobilized its resources for a nationwide birth control campaign
administered by a group in the State Council. Committees to oversee birth control activities
were established at all administrative levels and in various collective
enterprises. This extensive and seemingly effective network covered both the
rural and the urban population. In urban areas public security headquarters
included population control sections. In rural areas the country's "barefont doctors" distributed
information and contraseptives to people's comununne members. By 1973 Mao Zendong was
personally identified with the family planning movement, signifying a greater
leadership commitment to controlled population growth than ever before. Yet
until several years after Mao's death in 1976, the leadership was reluctant to
put forth directly the rationale that population control was necessary for economic growth and improved living standarts.
Population growth
targets were set for both administrative units and individual families. In the
mid-1970s the maximum recommended family size was two children in cities and
three or four in the country. Since 1979 the government has advocated a
one-child limit for both rural and urban areas and has generally set a maximum
of two children in special circumstances. As of 1986 the policy for minority
nationalities was two children per couple, three in special circumstances, and
no limit for ethnic groups with very small populations. The overall goal of the
one-child policy was to keep the total population within 1.2 billion through
the year 2000, on the premise that the Four Modernizations program
would be of little value if population growth was not brought under control.
The one-child policy
was a highly ambitious population control program. Like previous programs of
the 1960s and 1970s, the one-child policy employed a combination of public
education, social pressure, and in some cases coercion. The one-child policy
was unique, however, in that it linked reproduction with economic cost or
benefit.
Under the one-child
program, a sophisticated system rewarded those who observed the policy and
penalized those who did not. Couples with only one child were given a
"one-child certificate" entitling them to such benefits as cash
bonuses, longer maternity lives, better child care, and preferential housing assignments.
In return, they were required to pledge that they would not have more children.
In the countryside, there was great pressure to adhere to the one-child limit.
Because the rural population accounted for approximately 60 percent of the
total, the effectiveness of the one-child policy in rural areas was considered
the key to the success or failure of the program as a whole.
In rural areas the
day-to-day work of family planning was done by cadres at
the team and brigade levels who were responsible for women's affairs and by
health workers. The women's team leader made regular household visits to keep
track of the status of each family under her jurisdiction and collected
information on which women were using contraceptives, the methods used, and
which had become pregnant. She then reported to the brigade women's leader, who
documented the information and took it to a monthly meeting of the commune
birth-planning committee. According to reports, ceilings or quotas had to be
adhered to; to satisfy these cutoffs, unmarried young people were persuaded to
postpone marriage, couples without children were advised to "wait their
turn," women with unauthorized pregnancies were pressured to have abortions, and those who already had
children were urged to use contraceptions or undergo sterilizations.
Couples with more than one child were exhorted to be sterilized.
The one-child policy
enjoyed much greater success in urban than in rural areas. Even without state
intervention, there were compelling reasons for urban couples to limit the
family to a single child. Raising a child required a significant portion of
family income, and in the cities a child did not become an economic
asset until he or she entered the work force at age sixteen. Couples with only
one child were given preferential treatment in housing allocation. In addition,
because city dwellers who were employed in state enterprises received pensions
after retirement, the sex of their first child was less important to them than
it was to those in rural areas.
Numerous reports
surfaced of coercive measures used to achieve the desired results of the
one-child policy. The alleged methods ranged from intense psychological
pressure to the use of physical force, including some grisly accounts of forced
abortions and infanticide. Chinese officials admitted that isolated, uncondoned
abuses of the program occurred and that they condemned such acts, but they
insisted that the family planning program was administered on a voluntary basis
using persuasion and economic measures only. International reaction to the
allegations were mixed. The UN funds for populations activities and
the International Planted Parenthood Federations were generally supportive of
China's family planning program. The United States Agency for International developments,
however, withdrew US$10 million from the Fund in March 1985 based on
allegations that coercion had been used.
Observers suggested
that an accurate assessment of the one-child program would not be possible
until all women who came of childbearing age in the early 1980s passed their
fertile years. As of 1987 the one-child program had achieved mixed results. In
general, it was very successful in almost all urban areas but less successful
in rural areas.
Rapid fertility
reduction associated with the one-child policy has potentially negative
results. For instance, in the future the elderly might not be able to rely on
their children to care for them as they have in the past, leaving the state to
assume the expense, which could be considerable. Based on United Nations and
Chinese government statistics, it was estimated in 1987 that by the year 2000
the population 60 years and older (the retirement age is 60 in urban areas)
would number 127 million, or 10.1 percent of the total population; the
projection for 2025 was 234 million elderly, or 16.4 percent. According to
projections based on the 1982 census, if the one-child policy were maintained
to the year 2000, 25 percent of China's population would be age 65 or older by
the year 2040.
