IB History Population Control and One-child Policy Notes

The One-Child Policy: Demographic Control Created Lasting Social Costs

1. In the early PRC, Mao-era leaders generally associated a large population with national strength and productive labour power, and pronatalist attitudes discouraged family planning through the 1950s and early 1960s.
2. By the 1970s, concern about resource pressure led to the "later, longer, fewer" (wan xi shao) campaign, which encouraged later marriage, longer intervals between births, and fewer children overall, achieving a significant fall in fertility even before the one-child policy began.
3. The one-child policy was introduced nationally around 1979 to 1980, restricting most urban couples to a single child as part of a drive to curb population growth alongside the launch of economic reform.
4. Couples typically required official permission before having a child, administered through local family-planning committees that monitored menstrual cycles, pregnancies and birth quotas at the workplace and neighbourhood level.
5. Enforcement measures included substantial fines, loss of employment benefits, and, in some provinces, forced sterilisation or abortion for unauthorised pregnancies, making the policy one of the most invasive state interventions into family life in modern history.

1. Many rural couples were permitted a second child under specified conditions, most commonly if their first child was a girl, reflecting both the practical difficulty of enforcing a strict one-child rule in the countryside and the persistence of son preference in agricultural households.
2. China's officially recognised ethnic minorities generally faced less restrictive birth limits than the Han majority, with many minority families permitted two or more children as part of the state's ethnic minority policy.
3. Traditional son preference combined with birth limits and the availability of prenatal ultrasound to encourage sex-selective abortion, producing a significant gender imbalance: by 2010, China had roughly 120 males born for every 100 females.
4. Some children born outside official birth quotas were never registered with the hukou system, becoming so-called "black children" (heihaizi) who lacked legal identity documents and faced exclusion from school enrolment, healthcare and formal employment.
5. Decades of below-replacement fertility accelerated the ageing of China's population, sharply reducing the ratio of working-age adults to retirees and creating long-term pressure on pensions, healthcare and elder care that outlived the policy itself.
6. Facing this demographic pressure, the government announced a nationwide two-child policy in 2015, which took effect on 1 January 2016, replacing the one-child framework; a three-child policy followed in 2021 as fertility continued to fall.