BEIJING (AP) — China’s one-child policy, one of the harshest attempts at population control the world has seen, forced abortions on women, made sterilization widespread and led to baby girls being sold or even killed, because parents wanted their only child to be a boy.
Now, experts say, the question is whether it was all necessary. China’s birth rate fell to a record low last year and its population shrank for a fourth straight year, official statistics showed this week. Authorities, alarmed by the prospect of a shrinking workforce and an aging population, abandoned the policy in 2015.
“It’s hard to escape the fact that China demographically shot itself in the foot,” said Mei Fong, author of the 2016 book, “One Child: The Story of China’s Most Radical Experiment.”
Population growth as a threat
China’s leaders saw rampant population growth as a potential threat in the 1980s — both to economic development and to its ability to feed what had grown into a nation of a billion people.
The poor country of that time was not the only one worried that at that time it had too many people. Population control was a hot topic internationally and experts feared that rapid growth in China, India and elsewhere could overwhelm the world’s resources.
The birth rate had started to decrease in the 1970s after the government started encouraging people to have fewer children. It is not clear how much of its decline since then has resulted from the one-child policy and to what degree it would have occurred anyway because of the tremendous economic and societal changes over the past four decades.
Stiff fines and sterilization
But the leadership of the time decided to curb population growth more directly, launching the one-child policy and enforcing it with harsh financial penalties for parents who had more than one child, as well as abortion and sterilization campaigns. It lasted 35 years.
Yi Fuxian, a senior scientist in obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, notes that the number of people who have been sterilized has dropped from 1.4 million women and 180,000 men in 2014, two years before the policy was eased, to 190,000 women and 2,2000 men in 2,600 men.
In 2016, the government started allowing two children per couple and raised the limit to three children in 2021. But it proved to be more difficult to change people’s mentality than politics.
‘little emperors’
China is far from the only country facing the challenges of an aging population. Around the world, as people become richer, they tend to want fewer, or no, children.
But the one-child policy, which leads to a preference for sons, has also created a gender imbalance in the one-child generation.
Now, some of that generation, who were once referred to as “little emperors” because they were so confused, face the pressure to meet the expectations, including financial ones, of being an only child.
As they reach their 30s and 40s, there is only one child to support two parents, and in some cases, up to four grandparents. For some, this can lead to anxiety and depression, Fong said.
“The little emperor at some point becomes the slave,” she said.
Placing a tax on condoms
China is an aging society that will likely face a major shortage in the coming decades: not enough people of working age to support a growing population of retirees. This could combine government finances and pension systems.
The government has launched a slew of policies to try to boost the birth rate, from eliminating tax exemptions for condoms to cash subsidies to childbearing couples. But the experience of other countries shows that it is difficult to change the declining birth rate.