The one-child policy in China

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The initiative

The challenge

The public impact

  • Stakeholder engagement Weak
  • Political commitment Strong
  • Public confidence Fair
  • Clarity of objectives Good
  • Strength of evidence Fair
  • Feasibility Good
  • Management Good
  • Measurement Weak
  • Alignment Fair

Bibliography

The Chinese central government  officially established the "one-child policy"  in 1979 , although several initiatives for birth control had already been in place since the early 1970s and had already achieved significant reductions in the national birth rate. It aimed to control population growth, which the government began to see as a threat to the country's economic ambitions. Its basis was that a couple was allowed to have only one child. Initial efforts began in the 1960s as a critical response to the famine facing the population. "A push under the slogan 'Late, Long and Few' was successful: China's population growth dropped by half from 1970 to 1976. But it soon levelled off, prompting officials to seek more drastic measures. In 1979 they introduced a policy requiring couples from China's ethnic Han majority to have only one child (the law has largely exempted ethnic minorities)." [2]

To enforce this, the government granted certain benefits to those who complied (increased access to education for all, plus childcare and healthcare offered to families that followed this rule) and other measures which penalised those who did not comply, e.g., fines and no access to these benefits. [3]  Similarly, the policy increased the legal age for marriage to 22 years for men and 20 years for women in a bid to prevent population growth. [4]

The birth control policies implemented varied at the national and local level. National policies, such as the one-child policy, were applicable throughout the whole country, but local policies, such as penalties for above-quota births, varied between regions, such as rural and urban, or between provinces. [5]

China had been actively influencing its population growth for several years, beginning after the establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949, when Mao Zedong encouraged the population to grow in order to increase manpower. Although there was no official policy at the time, government propaganda condemned contraceptives and introduced other measures that led to the population doubling over the next few years.

This led to unexpected challenges as food supply became scarce, and from 1959 to 1961, the Great Chinese Famine killed an estimated 15 to 30 million people. As a result, the government started to reverse its campaign. "In 1979, the government introduced the one-child policy, under which most couples are allowed to have only one child or else face the possibility of fines, sterilisations, and abortions." [1]

The aggressive implementation of the one-child policy in China had significant impact on the growth of the birth rate and population in the country. The birth rate in China fell from 1979 onwards, and the rate of population growth dropped to 0.7%.

This caused unexpected imbalances in the demographic development of the country.  Due to a traditional preference for boys, large numbers of female babies ended up homeless or in orphanages, and in some cases were killed. "In 2000, it was reported that 90 percent of foetuses aborted in China were female. As a result, the gender balance of the Chinese population has become distorted. Today it is thought that men outnumber women by more than 60 million." [6]

Another unintended long-term effect of this policy was that low birth rates also led to a rapid change in the population age pyramid. A study conducted before the end of the policy predicted that "the number of Chinese citizens over the age of 65 will soar to 219 million in 2030 and grow to make up a quarter of China's entire population by 2050. This means a significant portion of residents will age out of the labour force." [7]

Stakeholder engagement

The main stakeholder behind this initiative was the central government, which was very concerned that uncontrolled growth in the population could threaten the country's ambitions for prosperity. There is no evidence of consultations with stakeholders at the local or institutional level before this policy was implemented. However, there were incentives put in place to ensure the compliance of local officials, in the form of fiscal and career rewards for achieving birth targets, and penalties for falling short.  Officials could even be demoted for allowing too many above-quota births in their community, which meant that they would lose all future income and other benefits associated with their roles. [8]

The radical nature of the policy and the risk of non-compliance opened up many opportunities for corruption. "A number of anti-corruption drives have taken place over the years, and recent reports indicate that in some areas Chinese officials themselves are among the greatest violators of family planning policies." [9]

Political commitment

Curbing population growth became a major priority for the Chinese government. "Family planning is accorded an extremely high priority by the Chinese government, which is worried that China's immense and growing population could offset the gains made by economic reforms." [10] Deng Xiaoping, who led the country from 1978 to 1989, made this clear in a statement on the perceived necessity of the one-child policy. "In order for China to achieve the four modernisations, it must overcome at least two important roadblocks. The first one is weak economic standing. The second one is a large population with limited arable land. Now the population is more than 900 million, 80 percent of which are farmers. The coin of a large population has two sides. Under the condition of insufficient development, all the problems related to food, education and employment are severe ones. We should deepen the implementation of the family planning policy, and even if the population does not increase in the following years, the problem of population will still exist over a long period of time." [11]

Significant funds were allocated to the initiative through the budget for family planning, which was increased by approximately 18% per year throughout the 1980s, and after 1991 was doubled to USD1.1 billion. [12]

Public confidence

The Chinese government rewarded those who complied with the one-child policy in numerous ways, such as preferential housing, food subsidies, medical care, education, a monthly health allowance, job promotions, and special bonuses for volunteering for sterilisation. [13]  However, the inflexibility and swiftness with which the government implemented the one-child policy also generated significant opposition from the public, exacerbated by reports of forced abortions and other human rights issues. "Although the one-child policy — and the accompanying mass campaign of sterilisation and induced abortion — led to a decline in fertility, it also caused a popular uproar and ignited strong resistance, especially in China's vast rural areas." [14]

The number of forced abortions and sterilisations caused widespread bitterness and resentment. "'I support the family planning policy, but not their methods,' said Ji Shuqiang, 42, working behind the cash register at the village store. 'If they find a woman who's pregnant, no matter how far along, they'll make you have an abortion.' An older man, who despite the urging of the others was afraid to give his name, said his wife had been sterilised 34 years ago after the birth of their only child, a daughter. He was still furious. 'We hate family planning more than anything else. We don't agree with the government's policy on this.'" [15]

Clarity of objectives

There were several growth targets established by the government through their initial campaigns before the one-child policy was put in place: the fourth five-year plan in 1970 was the first to include targets for the population growth rate, and the target set for 1980 was a growth rate of 1%. However, as the government realised that their targets were unrealistic, most population growth rate targets were abandoned in the early 1980s. When the one-child policy was implemented, the official policy was to aim for a population of around 1.2 billion in 2000. [16]

Regulations included restrictions on family size, late marriage and childbearing, and the spacing of children (in cases in which second children were permitted). There were also a number of exceptions, including: families in which the first child had a disability or both parents worked in high-risk occupations (such as mining) or were themselves from one-child families (in some areas).  In rural areas (where around 70% of the population lived), a second child was normally allowed after five years, but this sometimes only applied if the first child were a girl — a clear acknowledgment of the traditional preference for boys. A third child could also be allowed among some ethnic minorities and in underpopulated areas. [17]

Apart form the overall population target, there is no evidence of clearer objectives allowing to track the policy. This, coupled with the variability of guidelines explained above, made the policy extremely difficult to monitor.

Strength of evidence

Feasibility

There was a range of initiatives put in place and significant resources allocated to the implementation of the one-child policy. Family planning was coordinated at the federal level by the State Family Planning Commission (SFPC), which had approximately 520,000 full time cadres, and the Birth Planning Association, which assisted government in enforcement and implementation, had over 83 million part-time employees working at 1 million locations throughout China. [19] In addition, some 900,000 family planning associations had an estimated membership of between 36 and 50 million volunteers. [20]  The government also increased the family planning budget by approximately 18% per year throughout the 1980s, and doubled it after 1991. [21]

The Communist Party published the new Marriage Law in 1980, mandating that couples were obliged to practise family planning, with a limit of one child for each family. This gave legal force to the policy. [22] However, clear communication was limited, and its interpretation and implementation were generally left to local officials to define in response to local conditions. "Sources indicate that implementation of family planning regulations differs from region to region and even within specific localities". [23]

The central government led the policy at the national level, with the State Family Planning Bureau setting targets and policy direction. Family planning committees at provincial and county levels were responsible of developing local strategies for implementation. [24] Similarly, Population and Family Planning Commissions at the national, provincial and local levels were expected to promote the policy, register births, and carry out family inspections. Provincial governments enforced the policy through a mix of rewards and penalties enforced at the discretion of local officials. “They include economic incentives for compliance and substantial fines, confiscation of belongings, and dismissal from work for non-compliance.” [25]

The evaluation of officials was tied to the ability to meet birth quotas within their jurisdictions. “The leaders of units who meet these birth quotas are more likely to get promotions and bonuses. If a particular area does not meet its birth quota, meaning that the number of children born is in excess of the number the government allows, the leaders of the local population control units would be held responsible for this failure and be disqualified from promotions or bonuses." [26] The establishment of unreasonable targets led to widespread corruption and meddling in the reporting of official figures, which is one of the most significant negative effects of the management method that was used.

Measurement

The policy required restrictions on family sizes and birth figures at the local and national levels, and Population and Family Planning Commissions were responsible for implementing this mandate. “This policy stated that citizens must obtain a birth certificate before the birth of their children. In 1980, the birth-quota system was established to monitor population growth. Under this system, the government set target goals for each region. Local officials were mainly held responsible for making sure that population growth totals did not exceed target goals. If target goals were not met, the local officials were punished by law or by loss of privileges.” [27]

However, it not clear whether a consistent methodology was used for this,  or appropriate measurements actually took place, as both the public and enforcement officials had strong incentives to conceal the real numbers. The rigour and penalties applied when enforcing the policy led people to avoid reporting for fear of repercussions, and this also affected the accurate monitoring of outcomes. "The 1995 population survey reported average male:female ratios of 108:100 in rural areas. But this is not just because of sex-selective abortion (which is now illegal, though undoubtedly still occurs), but also because of failure to report female births." [28]

The main driver for the central government in curtailing growth of the population was that it perceived its increase as detrimental to the growth of the economy. At the local level, however, these issues were not so relevant, so there was a need to provide a motivation for local officials to enforce the one-child policy. It used a quota reward system for Planning Officials who carried out the birth control policies. If they did not meet quotas, they were either punished or would lose the opportunity to earn promotions. [29]

For the population at large, the government applied  incentives and sanctions to encourage compliance with the policy's goals. "People were to be encouraged to have only one child through a package of financial and other incentives, such as preferential access to housing, schools, and health services. Discouragement of larger families included financial levies on each additional child and other sanctions which ranged from social pressure to curtailed career prospects for those in government jobs. Specific measures varied from province to province.” [30]

An Evaluation of 30 Years of the One-Child Policy in China , 10 November 2009, The Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission

Challenging Myths About China's One-Child Policy, Martin King Whyte et al, 2015, The China Journal

China: Family planning laws, enforcement and exceptions in the provinces of Guangdong and Fujian (2010-September 2012), Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada

China one-child policy leads to forced abortions, mothers' deaths, Barbara Demick, 15 June 2012, Los Angeles Times

China One-Child Policy: Some unintended Consequences, David Howden and Yang Zhou, 2014, Institute of Economic Affairs

China's One-Child Policy, Laura Fitzpatrick, 27 July 2009, Time

China's one child family policy, Penny Kane and Ching Y Choi, 9 October 1999, US National Library of Medicine

Couples must wait for law to catch up with China's ‘second-child' policy, 31 October 2015, The Inquirer: China Daily/Asia News Network

History of the Chinese Family Planning Program: 1970-2010, Cuntong Wang, October 2011, Contraception

Managing population change - Case study: China, BBC

One-Child Policy Update, January 1995, Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada

Population Control and Consequences in China, Jamie Cook, 5 December 1999, University of Nebraska

Prepared Statement for Harry Wu, 5 November 2009, Director of Laogai Research Foundation, Human Rights Commission in Washington, DC

See How the One-Child Policy Changed China, Aileen Clarke, 13 November 2015, National Geographic

The Effect of China's One-Child Family Policy after 25 Years, Therese Hesketh, et al, 15 September 2005, The New England Journal of Medicine

The Effect of the One-Child Policy on Fertility in China: Identification Based on the Differences-in-Differences, Hongbin Li et al, 11 August 2005, The Chinese University of Hong Kong

The One Child Family Policy, W X Zhu, US National Library of Medicine

When a Son is Born: The Impact of Fertility Patterns on Family Finance in Rural China, Weili Ding and Yuan Zhang, March 2011, Queens University

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Assessing the impact of the “one-child policy” in China: A synthetic control approach

Stuart gietel-basten.

1 Division of Social Sciences, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong, PRC

2 Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, Beijing, PRC

3 Population Research Institute, LSE-Fudan Research Centre for Global Public Policy, Fudan University, Shanghai, PRC

Associated Data

All relevant data are within the manuscript and its Supporting Information files.

There is great debate surrounding the demographic impact of China’s population control policies, especially the one-birth restrictions, which ended only recently. We apply an objective, data-driven method to construct the total fertility rates and population size of a ‘synthetic China’, which is assumed to be not subjected to the two major population control policies implemented in the 1970s. We find that while the earlier, less restrictive ‘later-longer-fewer’ policy introduced in 1973 played a critical role in driving down the fertility rate, the role of the ‘one-child policy’ introduced in 1979 and its descendants was much less significant. According to our model, had China continued with the less restrictive policies that were implemented in 1973 and followed a standard development trajectory, the path of fertility transition and total population growth would have been statistically very similar to the pattern observed over the past three decades.

Introduction

In 2015, China finally ended all one-birth restrictions [ 1 ]. The move to a national two-child policy is intended to facilitate a more balanced population development and to counter aging. There is currently a large focus placed on the appraisal of the population control policies (often erroneously thought of as the ‘one-child policy’) imposed in the late 1970s [ 2 ]. The world's most comprehensive national-level population control policy has been subject to many criticisms, both domestically and internationally [ 3 , 4 ]. Sanctioned and unsanctioned instances of forced abortion [ 5 ], sterilization [ 6 ], and institutional financial irregularities [ 7 ] have been identified as bases for criticism. The policies have also been cited as the root cause of other challenges [ 8 ], including skewed sex ratios at birth [ 9 ], the questionable demographic data because of hidden children [ 10 ], and social problems associated with the enforced creation of millions of one-child families (like the social, economic, and psychological plight of couples who lost their only child and are now unable to have more children) [ 11 ].

On the other hand, China's population control policies have also been recognized as being effective. This ‘effectiveness’ is based on the estimations that hundreds of millions of births had been ‘averted’ [ 12 ] and the penalty of “above-quota-births” was found reducing births in rural China [ 13 ]. According to an environmentalist narrative, these births (and the resultant population growth) would have contributed to further climate change [ 14 ]. In 2014, for example, The Economist labeled the ‘China one-child policy’ as the fourth largest ‘action’ to slow global warming, estimated at 1.3bn tonnes of CO2 [ 15 ]. Elsewhere, the popular media, as well as other commentators, regularly espouse a ‘one-child policy' as a panacea to respond to perceived ‘overpopulation' and associated concerns of both an environmental and Malthusian nature. Indeed, UN Resident Coordinator in Kenya, Siddharth Chatterjee, said in 2017 the first annual Africa-China Conference on Population and Development, "China is an example to the rest of the developing countries when it comes to family planning."

These calculations of ‘births averted’ are based on various models, which employ counterfactual history. The estimate of ‘400 million births averted’ is attributed to the one-child population policy [ 16 ], which is usually calculated by holding earlier, higher fertility rates constant. Other estimates compared the Chinese experience with either a country or group of countries considered to be similar to China in terms of certain socioeconomic and political indicators. The problem with such counterfactual histories is that they are inevitably subjective and indicators considered did not enter into the model in a systematic way. Contrast to the estimation of 400 million births averted, the effect of the one-child policy is found to be small, especially for the long-run [ 17 ], which was attributed to the aggressive family planning program in the early 1970s [ 18 ] based on the findings that the birth rate of 16 countries with similar birth rates to that of China in 1970 declined significantly after 1979 and even sharper than what was observed in China [ 19 ].

To evaluate the impact of China’s population control policies, we employ the Synthetic Control Method where we compare China to a constructed ‘synthetic’ control population, which shares similar features with China during the pre-intervention periods. This innovative data- and math-driven methodology is used extensively in many disciplines, including public health [ 20 ], politics [ 21 ], and economics [ 22 ]. One of the caveats of our paper is that we cannot single out the ‘cohort’ effects. In addition to the socio-economic factors, the decline of TFRs might partially be the result that females entering childbearing age in 1970s did not think giving more births is “fashionable” compared to those who entered childbearing age in 1950s. Such mindset changes have been observed in Brazil [ 23 ]. Unfortunately, our approach cannot differentiate the cohort effect from the impact of social-economic factors. We have to bear in mind this caveat in the following analysis.

In the case of China, the first intervention (or ‘shock’) we seek to evaluate is the ‘Later-Longer-Fewer Policy’ introduced in 1973 [ 7 ]. Under this policy, a minimum age of marriage was imposed, as well as mandatory birth spacing for couples and a cap on the total number of children [ 24 ]. The rules were differentiated for men and women in rural and urban areas. Also, like the case in other countries, widespread contraception (and free choice) was introduced, coupled with large-scale education on family planning [ 25 ]. The second ‘shock’ is the ‘One-Child Policy' introduced in 1979, where a one-child quota was strictly enforced. Following initial ‘shock drives' of intensive mass education, insertion of IUDs after the first birth, sterilization after the second birth, and large-scale abortion campaigns, the policy quickly became unpopular and was reformed in 1984 and onwards, creating a very heterogeneous system [ 26 ]. Despite the series of reforms, the majority of couples in China were still subject to one-child quotas in the 1980s and 1990s.

Institutional Background

With high birth rates in the 1970s, the Chinese government had grown increasingly concerned about the capacity of existing resources to support the ballooning population. In response, from 1973, the Chinese government widely promoted the practice of ‘later-longer-fewer’ to couples, referring respectively to later marriage and childbearing, longer intervals between births, and fewer children. Rules were more severe in urban areas where women were encouraged to delay marriage until the age of 25 and men at 28 and for couples to have no more than two children. In the rural areas, the age of marriage was set at a minimum of 23 for women, and 25 for men and the maximum family size was set at three children. Birth control methods and family planning services were also offered to couples. The policy at the time can be considered “mild” in a sense that couples were free to choose what contraceptive methods they would use and the policy on family planning was more focused on the education of the use of contraceptives [ 27 ].

However, such mild family planning program was deemed insufficient in controlling the population, since it would not be able to meet the official target of 1.2 billion people by 2000 despite the large decrease in the total fertility rate (TFR) in the late 1970s. In 1979, the government introduced the One-Child Policy in the Fifth National People’s Congress, a one-size-fits-all model and widely considered the world’s strictest family planning policy. Some exemptions were allowed, and a family could have more than one child if the first child has a disability, both parents work in high-risk occupations, and/or both parents are from one-child families themselves. The State Family Planning Bureau aimed to achieve an average of 1.2 children born per woman nationally in the early and mid-1980s [ 27 ].

From 1980 to 1983, the one-child policy was implemented through "shock drives" in the form of intensive mass education programs, IUD insertion for women after the first birth, sterilization for couples after the second birth, and abortion campaigns for the third pregnancy [ 27 , 28 ]. Policies were further enforced by giving incentives for compliance and disincentives for non-compliance, though these varied across local governments [ 27 ]. Liao [ 29 ] identified the following as the usual benefits and penalties at the local level. Families with only one child can obtain benefits like child allowance until age 14; easier access to schools, college admission, employment, health care, and housing; and reduction in tax payments and the opportunity to buy a larger land for families in rural areas. Penalties for having above-quota births, on the other hand, include reduction in the parents’ wages by 10 to 20 percent for 3 to 14 years, demotion or ineligibility for promotion for parents who work in the government sector, exclusion of above-quota children to attend public schools, and, in rural areas, a one-time fine which may account for a significant fraction of the parents’ annual income.

The tight one-child policy was met by resistance, and the government allowed more exemptions [ 27 ]. Exemptions were drafted at the local level as the Chinese Communist Party’s Central Committee took into account the diverse demographic and socioeconomic conditions across China [ 30 ]. In 1984, the program allowed two births per couple in rural areas if the first child is a girl or if the family is from a minority ethnic group, but this was done only in six provinces. One significant change in the family planning policy is that couples with one daughter in rural areas could have a second child after a certain interval, which ranges from four to six years, and this was fully implemented in 18 provinces by the end of 1989. The performance of local cadres was also evaluated with family planning activity as the top criterion [ 27 ]. The stringency of the one-child policy was further moderated amid China’s commitment to the International Conference on Population Development held in Cairo in 1994. In 1995, the family planning program changed its stance from being target-driven to client-centered in adherence to international reproductive health standards. More attention was given to individual contraceptive rights, and the government allowed couples to choose their contraceptive method with the guidance of the professional and technical staff [ 22 ].

Throughout the 1990s, provinces amended their own regulations about the exemptions under the guidelines of the State Family Planning Commission, now the National Population and Planning Commission [ 30 ]. According to Gu et al. [ 30 ], the provincial-level exemptions on allowing more than one child in a family can be classified into four broad groups: (1) gender-based and demographic (if the couple living in a rural area had the only daughter, or they belong to one-child family themselves); (2) economic (if the couple work in risky occupations or have economic difficulties); (3) political, ethical, and social (if the couple belong to a minority ethnic group, the man is marrying into a woman’s family, the family is a returning overseas Chinese, or the person has the status of being a single child of a revolutionary martyr); and (4) entitlement and replacement (if the couple’s first child died or is physically handicapped, the person who is divorced or widowed remarries, or the person is the only productive son in a family of multiple children in the rural area).

While the central government had asserted that population control remains a basic state policy, it hardly implemented a uniform set of rules across the country, hence the varying exemptions across localities [ 30 ]. This was until the Population and Family Planning Law of 2001 was put into effectivity. The law summarized the rights and obligations of Chinese citizens in family planning and served as the legal basis for addressing population issues at the national level. This law still promoted the one-child policy, but couples were given more reproductive rights, including the right to decide when to have children and the spacing between children if having a second child is allowed, as well as the right to choose contraceptive methods. It also discussed the imposition of social compensation fees for those who violated the law, which will be collected by local governments and family planning officials [ 27 ].

The one-child policy was further loosened in 2013 when it was announced that two children would be allowed if one parent is an only child [ 31 ]. Basten and Jiang [ 32 ] summarized the popular views on the issues that can be addressed by this policy shift: skewed sex ratio at birth, projected decline of the working-age population, large number of couples who were left childless because of the death of their only child, and evasion and selective enforcement of fines for out-of-quota and unauthorized births. They, however, argued that this change in the one-child policy could only have minimal impact on the aging population and shrinking workforce because of fertility preferences to have only one child and a smaller likelihood of these births to occur.

It was announced in October 2015 that the one-child policy would be replaced by a universal two-child policy. Driven by some evidence that this relaxation of the policy has not achieved a significant birth boosting effect, the Chinese government has started in 2018 to draft a proposed law that will remove all the limits on the number of children families can have [ 33 ].

The Synthetic control method

In this paper, we aim to assess the impact of the 1973 and 1979 family planning policies and to explain why there was no significant rise in the fertility rate observed after the birth control policy was relaxed in 2015. For this purpose, we use the Synthetic Control Method proposed by Abadie et al. [ 20 , 21 ] to the context of fertility behavior. The nature of the synthetic control method is to find countries with very similar fertility and other fertility-related demographic and socioeconomic features as China before the policy intervention by giving more weights to countries with the most similarities. For the post-intervention period, the fertility rate of similar countries with their corresponding weights is used to construct the synthetic China TFR, which represents the fertility rate if there were no policy intervention. The difference between the synthetic TFR and the observed TFR after the intervention is the impact of the policy. We formulate the relationship between the with- and without-intervention TFR as follows:

T F R i t 73 − 79 are the total fertility rate of country i after 1973 but before 1979 while T F R i t 79 o n w a r d are the total fertility rate of country i in time after 1979. T F R i t N o 73 p o l i c y and T F R i t w i t h 73 b u t n o 79 p o l i c y represent the TFRs assuming that there were no interventions and the TFRs assuming that there was only the 1973 intervention, respectively. D i t 73 and D i t 79 are dummy variables that take the value of one if country i is exposed to the respective intervention, which depends on whether the time t is pre- or post- the policy year. α i t 73 and α i t 79 capture the effect of the interventions in 1973 and 1979, respectively.

There are altogether J +1 countries and T time periods. For simplicity, we use T F R i t N to represent either T F R i t N o 73 p o l i c y or T F R i t w i t h 73 b u t n o 79 p o l i c y in the following deductions. Suppose that T F R i t N is given by a factor model:

where δ t is constant across all countries and only varies with time. Z i is a vector of observable variables that we believe affect the fertility rate but is not affected by the intervention policy. μ i represents an unobservable factor affecting fertility rate and varies across countries. ε it is the error term with zero means. To simplify, we equate i = 1 for China and T 0 (either 1973 or 1979) is the policy intervention year with 1≤ T 0 ≤ T .

We sum up the left-hand side and the right-hand side of Eq ( 3 ) for each period t before the intervention ( T F R i t = T F R i t N ) in all countries except China using different weights, which can be expressed as:

The optimal w j * achieves the following target:

The optimal w j * are the weights applied to replicate China’s fertility rate and other characteristics by using the fertility rates and other characteristics of all the other countries.

Therefore, for the period after intervention, the impact of the intervention can be estimated by:

We obtain the optimal w j * by minimizing the distance between ‖ X 1 − WX 0 ‖ where:

As reflected in the above procedure, the core of this method focuses on finding the combination of countries that collectively resemble China before the intervention. The model automatically assigns different weights to different countries in such a way that the distance between the actual and synthetic China before the policy intervention will be minimized in terms of fertility rate and other related characteristics. The optimal weights then are applied to the other countries for the post-intervention period to obtain Synthetic China without either the 1973 intervention or the 1979 intervention.

The next step is to decide what variables should be included in vector Z. We chose to include the childbearing age, life expectancy at birth, and sex ratio of male to female between 0 and 4 years old as the non-economic variables. The childbearing age affects the mothers’ age-specific fertility intensity and the total fertility rate [ 34 , 35 ]. With the maximum fertility age being certain, higher childbearing age might imply lower TFR. The life expectancy at birth is related to age-specific mortality. With a lower mortality rate, fewer births are required to obtain a desired number of children. For example, as observed by Galor [ 36 ], the TFR declined while the life expectancy improved in Western Europe in the past half-century. The sex ratio of male to female represents the inner-gender competition. A higher sex ratio of male to female implies higher competition among males, so it is more rewarding for females to delay marriage and to give birth in exchange for opportunities to obtain a better match with males. Using data from England and a generalized linear model, Chipman and Morrison [ 37 ] confirmed the significant negative relationship between the sex ratio of male to female and birth rate, especially for the three age groups of females at 20–24, 25–29, and 30–34 years old.

The other group of variables included in vector Z is economic variables, such as GDP per capita and years of schooling. The New Home Economics approach [ 38 ] emphasizes the negative relationship between income and fertility rate through the role of the opportunity cost of parenting time. The model suggests that more children will consume more parenting time, which could otherwise be used to generate more income. Galor and Weil [ 39 ] strengthened the reasoning by arguing that the increase in capital per capita raises women’s relative wages because the complementary effect of capital to female labor is higher than to male labor. The increase in women’s relative wage raises the cost of children. Because of the resulting smaller population effect, the lower fertility further raises the GDP per capita. In addition to the parenting opportunity cost, the economic development might result in fertility declines through two other channels:(1)With economic development, the living standards improved and the mortality rate decreased so that parents can have the same desirable living kids with fewer births; and (2) With the economic development, people have more tools to save, for example, the pension system, which reduces the needs of having more offspring to finance the retirement. The relationships between the macro-economy and the fertility patterns are documented for China [ 40 , 41 , 42 ]. The years of schooling also affects fertility through the opportunity costs channel. Higher education is associated with higher productivity, which would induce the higher opportunity cost of raising children.

Our analysis uses the TFR data in the period of 1955–1959 from the United Nations’ World Population Prospects (WPP) and the annual TFR data in 1960 to 2015 from the World Bank’s World Development Indicators (WDI) except for the following five economies. For Curaçao, Luxembourg, Serbia, Seychelles, and Taiwan, we use the UN’s WPP data in the entire period of 1955 to 2015. Like in the TFR data, we use the life expectancy at birth data in the period 1955–1959 from the UN’s WPP data, while annual life expectancy data in 1960 to 2015 is obtained from the WDI, except for the following four economies. For Curaçao, Serbia, Seychelles, and Taiwan, we use the UN’s WPP in the entire period of 1955 to 2015. The whole data series of the male-to-female ratio of the population aged 0–4 years old are obtained from the UN. We use the expenditure-side real GDP at chained PPPs and the size of population data from the Penn World Tables 9.0 (PWT 9.0) to calculate the GDP per capita and get its natural logarithm. The average years of schooling data obtained from the Barro-Lee Database is used to measure the average level of education in a given country. Historical schooling data are only available at five-year intervals, so we apply a linear interpolation method to infer the annual data from 1950 to 2010. The average childbearing age data are from the UN’s WPP in the entire period of 1955 to 2015. Additionally, all WPP data, except the male-to-female ratio, are only available at a five-year interval, so we also employ the linear interpolation method to get the annual estimates.

The original dataset consisted of 184 countries, but after removing the countries with missing data for the needed variables from 1955 to 2010, only 64 countries remained in the final dataset for the analysis, including China. The final list of countries included in the analysis is provided in Table A in S1 File .

Empirical result

For simplicity, we label synthetic China as Synth China, whose characteristics are constructed using the values of the other countries and the countries’ corresponding weights. We present the average values of our target variable TFR and fertility-related variables for Synth China and our comparator in Table 1 . The column on China shows the actual numbers for China, while the column on Synth China displays the values for the counterfactual Synth China for the pre-1973 period and pre-1979 and post-1973 period. For comparison purposes, we also include the average values of all countries in the sample as our comparator to show how different it would be between actual China and the whole sample in the absence of synthesizing. Looking at the pre-1973 period, Synth China has the same average TFR of 5.85 as actual China, while our comparator has an average of 4.71. For the remaining variables, the values of Synth China are all closer to that of actual China than those of our comparator, which indicates that Synth China resembles actual China not only in terms of TFR but also in terms of other fertility-related characteristics. Looking at the pre-1979 and post-1973 period, the TFR of Synth China is again almost the same as that of actual China.

Note: For the pre-1973, the pre-intervention period for TFR is 1955–1973 while for the others are 1965–1973.

All the other variables of Synth China are more comparable to actual China than to our comparator, except for average years of schooling. The significant difference (1.65 years) in years of schooling for the period of 1973–1979 between China (4.66 years) and the Synthetic cohort (6.31 years) is mainly due to the school-year-reduction-reform to taken by the Chinese government during the cultural revolution period (1966–1976). The original 6 years of primary schooling, 3 years of middle school, and 3 years of high school (6-3-3) for the pre-1966 periods were reduced to 5-2-2, respectively [ 43 ]. That means the same length of years of schooling represented higher accomplishment in terms of a diploma during 1966–1976. Five years of schooling in this period indicated completion of preliminary school while it used to represent the unaccomplished preliminary school. Most countries included in the studies adopted the 12-year schooling system. If we measure the accomplishment of education by using the relative years of schooling, which is to scale down by the years required for completion of high school—52% (4.66/9) for actual China and 53% (6.31/12) for Synthetic cohort—we would have quite close level of relative years of schooling between China and the Synthetic cohort. Additionally, the difference in years of schooling between actual China and the Synthetic cohort was not as significant for the pre-1973 intervention period (1965–1973) as for the pre-1979 and post-1973 period is because even the implementation of the school-year-reduction-reform was started from 1966 it requires five years for the effects to be fully materialized. The education system was changed back to 6-3-3 system after 1976.

In the following simulation, we use the periods 1973–1979 and 1980–2015 as the post-intervention periods to quantify the impact of the first and second shocks, respectively.

The TFR simulated for Synth China assuming without the 1973 shock, with the 1973 shock but without the 1979 shock, and the actual TFR are plotted in Fig 1 . The dashed blue line represents synthetic China's simulated TFR in the period 1955–1979 assuming without 1973 shock. The gap between the Synth China and actual China (represented by the solid black line) between 1973 and 1979 is the reduction in the TFR caused by the 1973 intervention. The dotted green line is the TFR of Synth China estimated for the period 1973–2015 with the period 1973–1979 as the pre-intervention period set to search for the optimal weights, which is to find the best comparable countries with fertility behaviors like China with 1973 shock but without 1979 shock. The simulated TFR for periods after 1979 is supposed to represent the TFR of China with the 1973 policy but without the 1979 policy. Contrary to the commonly claimed radical effect, the “One-Child” policy in 1979 only induced a small dip in the TFR.

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As shown in Fig 1 , the TFR in synthetic China is already well above the real TFR, even before the 1973 shock. The reason is that the best fit found by the algorithm cannot match the whole pattern of actual TFR (a complete overlap of actual and simulated China) for the pre-intervention periods, especially for the pre-1973 period (blue line). As shown in section 3, the target function for optimization is ‖ X 1 − WX 0 ‖, which measures the distance between the mean of actual China and Syn China without the policy of 73&79 for years before 1973. When the pattern of actual TFR is not well regulated, the simulated TFRs for the pre-1973 periods cannot match actual China for each year of the time series but to match on the average over the periods. It is why for pre-1960 periods, the blue line is above the black line while for the periods of1960-1970, the blue line is below the black line. Our conjecture on the reason for the irregular pattern of actual China in pre-1973 periods is that the government had been in a population policy struggling during this period [ 44 ] and the after-effect of the great fluctuations caused by China's Great Leap Forward famine (1958–1962). For example, right after the promotion of birth control policy in 1957, the birth control was catalyzed as anti-government in 1958. Not until 1962, birth control was encouraged again. Such changes of direction of the policy were very hard to simulate by finding the best comparable. Additionally, we identify the official announcement of "Later-Longer-Fewer Policy" in 1973 as the "shock." The informal introduction of such an idea started from 1971 when the encouragement of birth control was included as a "national" strategic policy. But only until 1973, the policy was announced officially with details. This explains why the SynthChina with FP 73&79 is already above actual China in 1973.

One interesting observation is that the TFR of Synth China with 1973 shock but without 1979 shock is lower than the observed TFR since 2003. Combining with the fact that the TFR reported in the Sixth Census in 2010 is lower than the TFR of Synth China, this appears to be providing indirect evidence on the common suspicion that the statistics on fertility rate might be “too low” and therefore the fertility effect of the 1979 policy could have been overstated.

Next, we apply the permutation test to evaluate the significance and robustness of the estimations. To do this, we produce a simulated sample of 500 countries by randomly drawing with replacement from the actual sample of 63 countries with China being excluded. Each country is treated as if it were China and is subjected to the 1973 and 1979 shocks. We construct the synthetic TFRs by following the same procedure carried out for Synth China. For each year, we calculate 500 simulated gaps between actual and synthetic TFRs, as shown in Fig 2 . The gaps for the simulated countries are represented by the grey lines, while the 95% confidence intervals by the red lines. The solid line denotes the gap between actual and Synth China, which is well below the lower bound of the 95% confidence interval from 1973 to 1979, indicating a significant reduction impact from the 1973 shock ( Fig 2 ). Meanwhile, the TFR gap between actual and Synth China stays within the confidence interval from 1980 onwards, implying that the 1979 shock had no significant impact ( Fig 2 ).

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(A)Permutation test with 1973 policy–gap between true TFR and synthetic TFR. (B) Permutation test with 1979 policy–gap between true TFR and synthetic TFR.

Population projection is carried out by using Spectrum 10 , wherein the actual TFR was replaced by the synthetic TFR from 1979 to 2015.

As Fig 1 and Fig 2 show, had China not implemented its later-longer-fewer set of population control measures in 1973, the fall in TFR would have been much shallower. Translating this into total population, this would amount to a difference of around 85 million by the end of the 1970s ( Fig 3 ). The impact of the second ‘shock,' namely the introduction of the stricter control measures in 1979, appears to be much more muted. While there are differences in the 1980s as a result of the reform involving the regulation on marriage age, the TFR for Synth China and actual China are broadly in sync from the early 1990s. In terms of total population difference, Synth China is some 70 million lower than actual China by 2015, as shown in Fig 3 . As discussed above, this puzzling outcome of the second shock might be due to the overstating tendency of the fertility statistics. Based on the permutation tests shown in Fig 2 , we can conclude that the 1973 policy significantly reduced the population by 85 million, while the 1979 policy does not have a statistically significant impact.

An external file that holds a picture, illustration, etc.
Object name is pone.0220170.g003.jpg

Furthermore, we use a bootstrap strategy to get the confidence interval for the population estimates assuming without the shock of 1973 policy. We randomly drew 500 sub-samples with the size of 90% of the original sample without replacement. For each sub-sample, we repeated the synthetic control approach to search for the best synthetic China in terms of TFR. Among the 500 subsamples, two samples cannot converge. Therefore, in the end, we have 498 Synthetic China. We further get the 5% lower and upper bounds of TFRs among simulated Synthetic China. Building on the 5% lower and upper bounds of TFRs, we further calculate the resulted population, with which to compare the actual population and get the corresponding reduced population. The lower and upper bounds of the reduced population serve as the 90% confidence interval of Synthetic China in terms of the population without 1973 policy shock. The corresponding reduction of the population associated with the 1973 policy is between 60 and 94 million.

As shown in Table 2 , the countries used to construct Synth China differed significantly between the 1973 and 1979 shocks. Before the 1973 shock, the greatest contribution was made by India (with a weight of 36.9%), a country that implemented a weaker family planning system and was characterized by high fertility throughout the 1970s [ 45 ]. Jordan, Thailand, Ireland, Egypt, and Korea came as the second to the sixth most comparable countries to China. All of them, except Ireland, had family planning policies. Jordan started family planning measures in the 1980s [ 46 ]; Thailand had done three rounds of family planning measures starting from 1963 to 1980 [ 47 ]; Egypt implemented three rounds of family planning measures in 1966, 1970, and 1979 [ 48 ]; and the family planning policy started in Korea in 1961 and lasted until the 1980s [ 49 ]. Even without any institutional background information, the synthetic control model has been able to select countries with family planning programs automatically.

Note: For the pre-1973 period, altogether, 57 countries were used to construct the Synth China. Here we only present countries with weights higher than 1%. For the pre-1979 but post- 1973 period, altogether, 21 countries were used to construct the Synth China. Here we only present countries with weights higher than 1%.

In the period 1973 to 1979, Korea overtook India as the country that most resembled China (75.2%). While the GDP per capita was considerably different between these two countries in this period (even in the current period), in the 1980s, they shared similarities in terms of the other variables not included in the model, including the GDP growth rate and the presence of an authoritarian political regime [ 50 , 51 ]. Furthermore, the Korean family planning system was extraordinarily comprehensive and was founded on new social norms around family size, as well as the development of rural areas in general [ 52 ]. Thailand still played an important role with a contribution of 16% to Synth China.

Robustness check

We further carried out several robustness checks by including the add-on policy intervention or altering the data coverage.

We examined first the impact of the commonly acknowledged temporary relaxation of the one-child policy during the late 1980s until the beginning of 1990s by using 1991 as another intervention year (Table B and Fig A in S1 File ). No significant impact was found.

A second robustness check done was performed by extending the coverage of the dataset. The baseline dataset of 64 countries used in the analysis was constructed by excluding countries with any missing value for the input and output variables from 1955 to 2010. Therefore, there is a possibility that countries sharing great similarities with China were excluded because of unavailable GDP per capita data in 1955 and onwards. The GDP per capita data were obtained from PWT 9.0, which is mostly accepted as one of the most reliable and complete sources of GDP data, especially when comparison across countries is required. To examine whether such exclusions would alter our conclusion, we revised our data construction by relaxing the time coverage requirement and allowing an unbalanced dataset for each shock. That is, if the input variables of a country for the required years by the Synthetic Control Method were available, we included it in the dataset. For example, countries previously excluded from our baseline model because of missing data on GDP per capita from 1955 to 1964 were included for assessing the impact of 1973 shock, and the availability of the GDP per capita data was only required from 1965 to 1973. It resulted in a dataset containing 103 countries for the 1973 shock and 123 countries for the 1979 shock (Tables C and D in S1 File ). Consistent with our baseline results, there was a significant decline in the TFR associated with the 1973 shock but insignificant impact with the 1979 shock (Table E and Fig B in S1 File ).

The final main robustness check done is restricting the coverage of countries in the dataset. We selected 25 countries as a focus group that had been subjectively recognized by previous literature as having similar fertility behavior as China (Table F in S1 File ). The focus group dataset with available data consisted of 17 countries for the 1973 shock and 20 countries for the 1979 shock. India, Indonesia, and Thailand were selected for Synth China in evaluating the 1973 shock and Korea, and Thailand was selected for Synth China in evaluating the 1979 shock, which was fewer than in our baseline analysis (Table G in S1 File ). Interestingly, the permutation test showed that even for the 1973 shock, the gap between the TFR of Synth China and actual TFR is located within the 95% interval. This indicates the insignificant impact of the 1973 shock. However, since there were only 16 countries used to do the random draw for the 500 paths, the variation contained in the permutation test is very limited, which weakened the reliability of the test (Fig C in S1 File ). The lower bound of the 95% confidence interval was dominated by Korea. Korea experienced a much sharper decline in TFR in the 1970s. Excluding Korea, China had the largest gap in the TFR.

As a robustness check, we also replace the TFRs used in our analysis with the UN-provided interpolated annual TFRs. The result is consistent with our baseline findings (see Table H and Fig D in S1 File ).

Limitations and conclusions

Of course, our study has various limitations. Firstly, from a data perspective, it is arguable that the veracity evidence derived for China–and, indeed, reconstructed for other countries–over the past seven decades is to be open to interpretation. This potential challenge is acknowledged and would, indeed, affect any and all studies of Chinese population history. However, the main argument of the likely impact of these two shocks still holds. Secondly, by considering China as a national unit, we do not disaggregate and consider the impact of the interventions (and policy differentials) at the sub-national unit. For example, it may be that the 1979 intervention had a more significant impact in one province than in others, dependent on the social and economic conditions of that region, coupled with the particular ‘history’ of birth control policies there. By considering only the aggregate level, we lose this granularity. Such an exercise would be a fruitful future avenue of research. The final criticism is a more holistic one. Is the size, complexity, the political, and economic system of China so unique that it is possible to create a ‘synthetic China’ at all? For sure, China is ‘different’ to most, if not all, countries of the world. However, the principle of the synthetic control approach is simply to draw similarities from other places if and where they exist. In this way, such an approach is more systematic, transparent, and viable than simply drawing on a single country comparator or a basket of other regions. Indeed, it could be argued that all possible units of analysis (countries, regions, towns) are ‘unique’ in their own way.

In this paper, we used the synthetic control method to assess the impact of the "One-Child" policy in China. Our findings strongly suggest that had China followed a standard development trajectory combined with the continuation of its comprehensive population control policies introduced in 1973 (‘later-longer-fewer'), the decline in the TFR and hence total population size would have been similar under the conditions of the stricter one-child policy and its various reforms thereafter. While the policies implemented in 1973 were restrictive in terms of spacing, timing and the quantum total number of children, and were also stricter than almost any other contemporary family planning program, they were, undoubtedly, less restrictive than what followed.

The implications of this study are two-fold. Firstly, by suggesting that the impact of the birth control policies may have been exaggerated in the past, we can better understand why the response to their relaxation has been relatively muted–or, at least, well below popular expectation. Secondly: it is impossible to ignore the fact that the strict birth control policies introduced in 1979 brought with them numerous negative and possibly unforeseen consequences. As well as the sanctioned activities and corrupt abuses which occurred within the birth control policy framework, the policies have been linked to the highly skewed sex ratio [ 53 ], the presence of millions of shidu fumu families who have lost their only child [ 54 ] as well as other challenges in both the development of family systems and individual behavior. The long-term psychological consequences of prioritizing one-child families have yet to be fully explored, not least in the context of possible efforts to spur childbearing in the future.

In this context, our analysis suggests that the population control policies implemented from 1979 have no significant demographic effect compared to a looser operationalization of population control and economic development. An important lesson for other countries that are planning to introduce population controls: the stricter controls might not be the effective one.

Supporting information

Acknowledgments.

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this paper are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views and policies of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank. The authors are responsible for any remaining errors in the paper.

The authors would like to thank Ma. Christina F. Epetia for her excellent research assistance.

Funding Statement

The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology provided support for this study in the form of salaries for SGB, but did not have any additional role in the study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. The Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank provided support for this study in the form of salaries for XH, but did not have any additional role in the study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. Fudan University provided support for this study in the form of salaries for YC, but did not have any additional role in the study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. The specific roles of these authors are articulated in the ‘author contributions’ section.

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In This Article Expand or collapse the "in this article" section China's One-Child Policy

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China's One-Child Policy by Tyrene White LAST REVIEWED: 12 October 2023 LAST MODIFIED: 29 November 2011 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199756223-0005

In 1979 China’s “one-child-per-couple” policy, or one-child policy, was launched. The policy was part of a multifaceted reform program pursued by the new regime under Deng Xiaoping, and its goal was to limit young, childbearing-age couples to only one child or, failing that, two children. With a population of about 1 billion in 1980, China’s leaders were convinced that only a strict program of population control would make it possible for China to achieve its development goal of “modernization by the year 2000.” This radical social engineering effort was directly at odds with much of China’s reform policy, which saw the state begin to retreat from its pervasive role in every aspect of family and social life. By subjecting childbearing to direct state regulation—that is, claiming that the state had the right and obligation to decide who was allowed to have a child and when—childbearing was effectively “collectivized” at a time when the economy was heading the opposite direction. It is no surprise, then, that the progression of the one-child policy was followed very closely by scholars, journalists, and human rights activists. An impressive body of scholarship has been compiled on this topic, despite serious constraints on research in the 1980s and 1990s. Four national censuses and annual sample surveys have helped improve the quality of demographic data available, but data on policy implementation has been patchy. As a result, two types of studies are dominant: (a) comprehensive works that provide an overview of policy evolution, implementation, and outcomes and (b) case studies that provide more detailed analysis of local policy processes. A third category of scholarship explores the impact and consequences of enforcement, particularly a skewed sex ratio at birth and a rapidly aging population. The scholarship on the one-child policy reflects the nature of the topic, which is broadly interdisciplinary, and the policy has been of great interest not only to political scientists but also to sociologists, economists, anthropologists, historians, and demographers. The works included here bear witness to this breadth of scholarly interest.

Several works provide a broad overview and interpretation of China’s one-child policy against the backdrop of China’s longer-term population control efforts and demographic changes. Banister 1987 and Tien 1991 examine China’s historical and contemporary demographic profile, as well as the evolution of China’s population policies after 1949 and the one-child policy. Both utilize data previously unavailable and data from the 1982 census to reconstruct the demographic past. More than a decade passed before a second set of volumes appeared. Scharping 2003 was the first to provide a sustained analysis of the origins and evolution of the one-child policy and its enforcement. This work was followed by Greenhalgh and Winckler 2005 and White 2007 . Scharping 2003 explores the demographic challenges China faced after 1949 and the policymaking process that led to the one-child limit. Greenhalgh and Winckler 2005 tracks China’s shift from a Leninist approach to population policy to one more in keeping with the neo-liberal regime that emerged during the reform era. White 2007 emphasizes the historical continuity between China’s pre-1979 approach to population policy and the one-child policy, and the contradiction between the Maoist campaign methods used for enforcement and the changing realities of reform-era politics in the countryside.

Banister, Judith. China’s Changing Population . Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1987.

Banister examines major demographic trends, particularly fertility and mortality. Using 1982 census data, she reconstructs the impact of the Great Leap Forward famine (1958–1960) and analyzes fertility decline in the 1970s, prior to the one-child policy. She concludes that state intervention played a significant role in the pace of fertility decline.

Greenhalgh, Susan, and Edwin Winckler. Governing China’s Population: From Leninist to Neoliberal Biopolitics . Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005.

Greenhalgh and Winckler trace the evolution of China’s policy development and implementation. Interprets China’s population policy as a particular type of biopolitics, one that evolved from a Leninist to a neoliberal form, tracking with China’s liberalizing economic and social reforms of the 1990s and 2000s, and with the rise of science and influential scientists who argued the necessity of a one-child policy.

Scharping, Thomas. Birth Control in China, 1949–2000: Population Policy and Demographic Development . London: Routledge, 2003.

Offers comprehensive coverage of population policymaking in China from 1949 to 2000 and the development of a bureaucracy capable of implementing the policy. Also examines the demographic consequences of the program.

Tien, H. Yuan. China’s Strategic Demographic Initiative . New York: Praeger, 1991.

Provides an overview of China’s demographic change during the People’s Republic and examines the evolution of population policy. Tien sees the one-child policy as a strategic demographic initiative, a necessary corrective to China’s demographic dilemma.

White, Tyrene. China’s Longest Campaign: Birth Planning in the People’s Republic, 1949–2005 . Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007.

Examines the evolution of China’s population policy after 1949 and how China’s distinctive “birth planning” policy led to a program of strict birth limits and the collectivization of childbearing. Rural resistance and the challenges of implementation are detailed. Argues that the mass campaign method of enforcement was the only one capable of overriding the resistance of villagers and local officials.

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Book cover

Investment in Early Childhood Education in a Globalized World pp 161–213 Cite as

One Child, Only Hope? No More: The Evolution of China’s Population Control Policy and Its Impact on Parenting and Childcare

  • Guangyu Tan 4  
  • First Online: 26 November 2019

746 Accesses

This chapter begins with a historical overview of China’s family planning policies, including the One-Child Policy, and the Universal Two-Child Policy, elucidating the historical, social, and political context of the implementation. It discusses the effects of the family planning policies on human capital investment and parent–child relationship. This chapter further explores how parenting philosophy, expectations, and practices have changed in response to globalization. It concludes with the findings from the current empirical case study.

  • China’s family planning policies
  • The One-Child Policy
  • The Universal Two-Child Policy
  • Human capital investment
  • Parenting philosophy

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Tan, G. (2019). One Child, Only Hope? No More: The Evolution of China’s Population Control Policy and Its Impact on Parenting and Childcare. In: Investment in Early Childhood Education in a Globalized World. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-60041-7_5

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Research Article

Assessing the impact of the “one-child policy” in China: A synthetic control approach

Contributed equally to this work with: Stuart Gietel-Basten, Xuehui Han, Yuan Cheng

Roles Conceptualization, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing

Affiliation Division of Social Sciences, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong, PRC

Roles Data curation, Formal analysis, Methodology, Software, Writing – original draft

Affiliation Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, Beijing, PRC

Roles Conceptualization, Formal analysis, Methodology, Software, Supervision, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing

* E-mail: [email protected]

Affiliation Population Research Institute, LSE-Fudan Research Centre for Global Public Policy, Fudan University, Shanghai, PRC

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  • Stuart Gietel-Basten, 
  • Xuehui Han, 

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  • Published: November 6, 2019
  • https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0220170
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Table 1

There is great debate surrounding the demographic impact of China’s population control policies, especially the one-birth restrictions, which ended only recently. We apply an objective, data-driven method to construct the total fertility rates and population size of a ‘synthetic China’, which is assumed to be not subjected to the two major population control policies implemented in the 1970s. We find that while the earlier, less restrictive ‘later-longer-fewer’ policy introduced in 1973 played a critical role in driving down the fertility rate, the role of the ‘one-child policy’ introduced in 1979 and its descendants was much less significant. According to our model, had China continued with the less restrictive policies that were implemented in 1973 and followed a standard development trajectory, the path of fertility transition and total population growth would have been statistically very similar to the pattern observed over the past three decades.

Citation: Gietel-Basten S, Han X, Cheng Y (2019) Assessing the impact of the “one-child policy” in China: A synthetic control approach. PLoS ONE 14(11): e0220170. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0220170

Editor: Bruno Masquelier, University of Louvain, BELGIUM

Received: October 24, 2018; Accepted: July 2, 2019; Published: November 6, 2019

Copyright: © 2019 Gietel-Basten et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Data Availability: All relevant data are within the manuscript and its Supporting Information files.

Funding: The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology provided support for this study in the form of salaries for SGB, but did not have any additional role in the study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. The Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank provided support for this study in the form of salaries for XH, but did not have any additional role in the study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. Fudan University provided support for this study in the form of salaries for YC, but did not have any additional role in the study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. The specific roles of these authors are articulated in the ‘author contributions’ section.

Competing interests: The authors have read the journal's policy and the authors of this manuscript have the following competing interests: SGB is paid employee of The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, XH is paid employees of Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, YC is paid employees of Fudan University. There are no patents, products in development or marketed products associated with this research to declare. This does not alter the authors' adherence to PLOS ONE policies on sharing data and materials.

Introduction

In 2015, China finally ended all one-birth restrictions [ 1 ]. The move to a national two-child policy is intended to facilitate a more balanced population development and to counter aging. There is currently a large focus placed on the appraisal of the population control policies (often erroneously thought of as the ‘one-child policy’) imposed in the late 1970s [ 2 ]. The world's most comprehensive national-level population control policy has been subject to many criticisms, both domestically and internationally [ 3 , 4 ]. Sanctioned and unsanctioned instances of forced abortion [ 5 ], sterilization [ 6 ], and institutional financial irregularities [ 7 ] have been identified as bases for criticism. The policies have also been cited as the root cause of other challenges [ 8 ], including skewed sex ratios at birth [ 9 ], the questionable demographic data because of hidden children [ 10 ], and social problems associated with the enforced creation of millions of one-child families (like the social, economic, and psychological plight of couples who lost their only child and are now unable to have more children) [ 11 ].

On the other hand, China's population control policies have also been recognized as being effective. This ‘effectiveness’ is based on the estimations that hundreds of millions of births had been ‘averted’ [ 12 ] and the penalty of “above-quota-births” was found reducing births in rural China [ 13 ]. According to an environmentalist narrative, these births (and the resultant population growth) would have contributed to further climate change [ 14 ]. In 2014, for example, The Economist labeled the ‘China one-child policy’ as the fourth largest ‘action’ to slow global warming, estimated at 1.3bn tonnes of CO2 [ 15 ]. Elsewhere, the popular media, as well as other commentators, regularly espouse a ‘one-child policy' as a panacea to respond to perceived ‘overpopulation' and associated concerns of both an environmental and Malthusian nature. Indeed, UN Resident Coordinator in Kenya, Siddharth Chatterjee, said in 2017 the first annual Africa-China Conference on Population and Development, "China is an example to the rest of the developing countries when it comes to family planning."

These calculations of ‘births averted’ are based on various models, which employ counterfactual history. The estimate of ‘400 million births averted’ is attributed to the one-child population policy [ 16 ], which is usually calculated by holding earlier, higher fertility rates constant. Other estimates compared the Chinese experience with either a country or group of countries considered to be similar to China in terms of certain socioeconomic and political indicators. The problem with such counterfactual histories is that they are inevitably subjective and indicators considered did not enter into the model in a systematic way. Contrast to the estimation of 400 million births averted, the effect of the one-child policy is found to be small, especially for the long-run [ 17 ], which was attributed to the aggressive family planning program in the early 1970s [ 18 ] based on the findings that the birth rate of 16 countries with similar birth rates to that of China in 1970 declined significantly after 1979 and even sharper than what was observed in China [ 19 ].

To evaluate the impact of China’s population control policies, we employ the Synthetic Control Method where we compare China to a constructed ‘synthetic’ control population, which shares similar features with China during the pre-intervention periods. This innovative data- and math-driven methodology is used extensively in many disciplines, including public health [ 20 ], politics [ 21 ], and economics [ 22 ]. One of the caveats of our paper is that we cannot single out the ‘cohort’ effects. In addition to the socio-economic factors, the decline of TFRs might partially be the result that females entering childbearing age in 1970s did not think giving more births is “fashionable” compared to those who entered childbearing age in 1950s. Such mindset changes have been observed in Brazil [ 23 ]. Unfortunately, our approach cannot differentiate the cohort effect from the impact of social-economic factors. We have to bear in mind this caveat in the following analysis.

In the case of China, the first intervention (or ‘shock’) we seek to evaluate is the ‘Later-Longer-Fewer Policy’ introduced in 1973 [ 7 ]. Under this policy, a minimum age of marriage was imposed, as well as mandatory birth spacing for couples and a cap on the total number of children [ 24 ]. The rules were differentiated for men and women in rural and urban areas. Also, like the case in other countries, widespread contraception (and free choice) was introduced, coupled with large-scale education on family planning [ 25 ]. The second ‘shock’ is the ‘One-Child Policy' introduced in 1979, where a one-child quota was strictly enforced. Following initial ‘shock drives' of intensive mass education, insertion of IUDs after the first birth, sterilization after the second birth, and large-scale abortion campaigns, the policy quickly became unpopular and was reformed in 1984 and onwards, creating a very heterogeneous system [ 26 ]. Despite the series of reforms, the majority of couples in China were still subject to one-child quotas in the 1980s and 1990s.

Institutional Background

With high birth rates in the 1970s, the Chinese government had grown increasingly concerned about the capacity of existing resources to support the ballooning population. In response, from 1973, the Chinese government widely promoted the practice of ‘later-longer-fewer’ to couples, referring respectively to later marriage and childbearing, longer intervals between births, and fewer children. Rules were more severe in urban areas where women were encouraged to delay marriage until the age of 25 and men at 28 and for couples to have no more than two children. In the rural areas, the age of marriage was set at a minimum of 23 for women, and 25 for men and the maximum family size was set at three children. Birth control methods and family planning services were also offered to couples. The policy at the time can be considered “mild” in a sense that couples were free to choose what contraceptive methods they would use and the policy on family planning was more focused on the education of the use of contraceptives [ 27 ].

However, such mild family planning program was deemed insufficient in controlling the population, since it would not be able to meet the official target of 1.2 billion people by 2000 despite the large decrease in the total fertility rate (TFR) in the late 1970s. In 1979, the government introduced the One-Child Policy in the Fifth National People’s Congress, a one-size-fits-all model and widely considered the world’s strictest family planning policy. Some exemptions were allowed, and a family could have more than one child if the first child has a disability, both parents work in high-risk occupations, and/or both parents are from one-child families themselves. The State Family Planning Bureau aimed to achieve an average of 1.2 children born per woman nationally in the early and mid-1980s [ 27 ].

From 1980 to 1983, the one-child policy was implemented through "shock drives" in the form of intensive mass education programs, IUD insertion for women after the first birth, sterilization for couples after the second birth, and abortion campaigns for the third pregnancy [ 27 , 28 ]. Policies were further enforced by giving incentives for compliance and disincentives for non-compliance, though these varied across local governments [ 27 ]. Liao [ 29 ] identified the following as the usual benefits and penalties at the local level. Families with only one child can obtain benefits like child allowance until age 14; easier access to schools, college admission, employment, health care, and housing; and reduction in tax payments and the opportunity to buy a larger land for families in rural areas. Penalties for having above-quota births, on the other hand, include reduction in the parents’ wages by 10 to 20 percent for 3 to 14 years, demotion or ineligibility for promotion for parents who work in the government sector, exclusion of above-quota children to attend public schools, and, in rural areas, a one-time fine which may account for a significant fraction of the parents’ annual income.

The tight one-child policy was met by resistance, and the government allowed more exemptions [ 27 ]. Exemptions were drafted at the local level as the Chinese Communist Party’s Central Committee took into account the diverse demographic and socioeconomic conditions across China [ 30 ]. In 1984, the program allowed two births per couple in rural areas if the first child is a girl or if the family is from a minority ethnic group, but this was done only in six provinces. One significant change in the family planning policy is that couples with one daughter in rural areas could have a second child after a certain interval, which ranges from four to six years, and this was fully implemented in 18 provinces by the end of 1989. The performance of local cadres was also evaluated with family planning activity as the top criterion [ 27 ]. The stringency of the one-child policy was further moderated amid China’s commitment to the International Conference on Population Development held in Cairo in 1994. In 1995, the family planning program changed its stance from being target-driven to client-centered in adherence to international reproductive health standards. More attention was given to individual contraceptive rights, and the government allowed couples to choose their contraceptive method with the guidance of the professional and technical staff [ 22 ].

Throughout the 1990s, provinces amended their own regulations about the exemptions under the guidelines of the State Family Planning Commission, now the National Population and Planning Commission [ 30 ]. According to Gu et al. [ 30 ], the provincial-level exemptions on allowing more than one child in a family can be classified into four broad groups: (1) gender-based and demographic (if the couple living in a rural area had the only daughter, or they belong to one-child family themselves); (2) economic (if the couple work in risky occupations or have economic difficulties); (3) political, ethical, and social (if the couple belong to a minority ethnic group, the man is marrying into a woman’s family, the family is a returning overseas Chinese, or the person has the status of being a single child of a revolutionary martyr); and (4) entitlement and replacement (if the couple’s first child died or is physically handicapped, the person who is divorced or widowed remarries, or the person is the only productive son in a family of multiple children in the rural area).

While the central government had asserted that population control remains a basic state policy, it hardly implemented a uniform set of rules across the country, hence the varying exemptions across localities [ 30 ]. This was until the Population and Family Planning Law of 2001 was put into effectivity. The law summarized the rights and obligations of Chinese citizens in family planning and served as the legal basis for addressing population issues at the national level. This law still promoted the one-child policy, but couples were given more reproductive rights, including the right to decide when to have children and the spacing between children if having a second child is allowed, as well as the right to choose contraceptive methods. It also discussed the imposition of social compensation fees for those who violated the law, which will be collected by local governments and family planning officials [ 27 ].

The one-child policy was further loosened in 2013 when it was announced that two children would be allowed if one parent is an only child [ 31 ]. Basten and Jiang [ 32 ] summarized the popular views on the issues that can be addressed by this policy shift: skewed sex ratio at birth, projected decline of the working-age population, large number of couples who were left childless because of the death of their only child, and evasion and selective enforcement of fines for out-of-quota and unauthorized births. They, however, argued that this change in the one-child policy could only have minimal impact on the aging population and shrinking workforce because of fertility preferences to have only one child and a smaller likelihood of these births to occur.

It was announced in October 2015 that the one-child policy would be replaced by a universal two-child policy. Driven by some evidence that this relaxation of the policy has not achieved a significant birth boosting effect, the Chinese government has started in 2018 to draft a proposed law that will remove all the limits on the number of children families can have [ 33 ].

The Synthetic control method

one child policy case study

As reflected in the above procedure, the core of this method focuses on finding the combination of countries that collectively resemble China before the intervention. The model automatically assigns different weights to different countries in such a way that the distance between the actual and synthetic China before the policy intervention will be minimized in terms of fertility rate and other related characteristics. The optimal weights then are applied to the other countries for the post-intervention period to obtain Synthetic China without either the 1973 intervention or the 1979 intervention.

The next step is to decide what variables should be included in vector Z. We chose to include the childbearing age, life expectancy at birth, and sex ratio of male to female between 0 and 4 years old as the non-economic variables. The childbearing age affects the mothers’ age-specific fertility intensity and the total fertility rate [ 34 , 35 ]. With the maximum fertility age being certain, higher childbearing age might imply lower TFR. The life expectancy at birth is related to age-specific mortality. With a lower mortality rate, fewer births are required to obtain a desired number of children. For example, as observed by Galor [ 36 ], the TFR declined while the life expectancy improved in Western Europe in the past half-century. The sex ratio of male to female represents the inner-gender competition. A higher sex ratio of male to female implies higher competition among males, so it is more rewarding for females to delay marriage and to give birth in exchange for opportunities to obtain a better match with males. Using data from England and a generalized linear model, Chipman and Morrison [ 37 ] confirmed the significant negative relationship between the sex ratio of male to female and birth rate, especially for the three age groups of females at 20–24, 25–29, and 30–34 years old.

The other group of variables included in vector Z is economic variables, such as GDP per capita and years of schooling. The New Home Economics approach [ 38 ] emphasizes the negative relationship between income and fertility rate through the role of the opportunity cost of parenting time. The model suggests that more children will consume more parenting time, which could otherwise be used to generate more income. Galor and Weil [ 39 ] strengthened the reasoning by arguing that the increase in capital per capita raises women’s relative wages because the complementary effect of capital to female labor is higher than to male labor. The increase in women’s relative wage raises the cost of children. Because of the resulting smaller population effect, the lower fertility further raises the GDP per capita. In addition to the parenting opportunity cost, the economic development might result in fertility declines through two other channels:(1)With economic development, the living standards improved and the mortality rate decreased so that parents can have the same desirable living kids with fewer births; and (2) With the economic development, people have more tools to save, for example, the pension system, which reduces the needs of having more offspring to finance the retirement. The relationships between the macro-economy and the fertility patterns are documented for China [ 40 , 41 , 42 ]. The years of schooling also affects fertility through the opportunity costs channel. Higher education is associated with higher productivity, which would induce the higher opportunity cost of raising children.

Our analysis uses the TFR data in the period of 1955–1959 from the United Nations’ World Population Prospects (WPP) and the annual TFR data in 1960 to 2015 from the World Bank’s World Development Indicators (WDI) except for the following five economies. For Curaçao, Luxembourg, Serbia, Seychelles, and Taiwan, we use the UN’s WPP data in the entire period of 1955 to 2015. Like in the TFR data, we use the life expectancy at birth data in the period 1955–1959 from the UN’s WPP data, while annual life expectancy data in 1960 to 2015 is obtained from the WDI, except for the following four economies. For Curaçao, Serbia, Seychelles, and Taiwan, we use the UN’s WPP in the entire period of 1955 to 2015. The whole data series of the male-to-female ratio of the population aged 0–4 years old are obtained from the UN. We use the expenditure-side real GDP at chained PPPs and the size of population data from the Penn World Tables 9.0 (PWT 9.0) to calculate the GDP per capita and get its natural logarithm. The average years of schooling data obtained from the Barro-Lee Database is used to measure the average level of education in a given country. Historical schooling data are only available at five-year intervals, so we apply a linear interpolation method to infer the annual data from 1950 to 2010. The average childbearing age data are from the UN’s WPP in the entire period of 1955 to 2015. Additionally, all WPP data, except the male-to-female ratio, are only available at a five-year interval, so we also employ the linear interpolation method to get the annual estimates.

The original dataset consisted of 184 countries, but after removing the countries with missing data for the needed variables from 1955 to 2010, only 64 countries remained in the final dataset for the analysis, including China. The final list of countries included in the analysis is provided in Table A in S1 File .

Empirical result

For simplicity, we label synthetic China as Synth China, whose characteristics are constructed using the values of the other countries and the countries’ corresponding weights. We present the average values of our target variable TFR and fertility-related variables for Synth China and our comparator in Table 1 . The column on China shows the actual numbers for China, while the column on Synth China displays the values for the counterfactual Synth China for the pre-1973 period and pre-1979 and post-1973 period. For comparison purposes, we also include the average values of all countries in the sample as our comparator to show how different it would be between actual China and the whole sample in the absence of synthesizing. Looking at the pre-1973 period, Synth China has the same average TFR of 5.85 as actual China, while our comparator has an average of 4.71. For the remaining variables, the values of Synth China are all closer to that of actual China than those of our comparator, which indicates that Synth China resembles actual China not only in terms of TFR but also in terms of other fertility-related characteristics. Looking at the pre-1979 and post-1973 period, the TFR of Synth China is again almost the same as that of actual China.

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All the other variables of Synth China are more comparable to actual China than to our comparator, except for average years of schooling. The significant difference (1.65 years) in years of schooling for the period of 1973–1979 between China (4.66 years) and the Synthetic cohort (6.31 years) is mainly due to the school-year-reduction-reform to taken by the Chinese government during the cultural revolution period (1966–1976). The original 6 years of primary schooling, 3 years of middle school, and 3 years of high school (6-3-3) for the pre-1966 periods were reduced to 5-2-2, respectively [ 43 ]. That means the same length of years of schooling represented higher accomplishment in terms of a diploma during 1966–1976. Five years of schooling in this period indicated completion of preliminary school while it used to represent the unaccomplished preliminary school. Most countries included in the studies adopted the 12-year schooling system. If we measure the accomplishment of education by using the relative years of schooling, which is to scale down by the years required for completion of high school—52% (4.66/9) for actual China and 53% (6.31/12) for Synthetic cohort—we would have quite close level of relative years of schooling between China and the Synthetic cohort. Additionally, the difference in years of schooling between actual China and the Synthetic cohort was not as significant for the pre-1973 intervention period (1965–1973) as for the pre-1979 and post-1973 period is because even the implementation of the school-year-reduction-reform was started from 1966 it requires five years for the effects to be fully materialized. The education system was changed back to 6-3-3 system after 1976.

In the following simulation, we use the periods 1973–1979 and 1980–2015 as the post-intervention periods to quantify the impact of the first and second shocks, respectively.

The TFR simulated for Synth China assuming without the 1973 shock, with the 1973 shock but without the 1979 shock, and the actual TFR are plotted in Fig 1 . The dashed blue line represents synthetic China's simulated TFR in the period 1955–1979 assuming without 1973 shock. The gap between the Synth China and actual China (represented by the solid black line) between 1973 and 1979 is the reduction in the TFR caused by the 1973 intervention. The dotted green line is the TFR of Synth China estimated for the period 1973–2015 with the period 1973–1979 as the pre-intervention period set to search for the optimal weights, which is to find the best comparable countries with fertility behaviors like China with 1973 shock but without 1979 shock. The simulated TFR for periods after 1979 is supposed to represent the TFR of China with the 1973 policy but without the 1979 policy. Contrary to the commonly claimed radical effect, the “One-Child” policy in 1979 only induced a small dip in the TFR.

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As shown in Fig 1 , the TFR in synthetic China is already well above the real TFR, even before the 1973 shock. The reason is that the best fit found by the algorithm cannot match the whole pattern of actual TFR (a complete overlap of actual and simulated China) for the pre-intervention periods, especially for the pre-1973 period (blue line). As shown in section 3, the target function for optimization is ‖ X 1 − WX 0 ‖, which measures the distance between the mean of actual China and Syn China without the policy of 73&79 for years before 1973. When the pattern of actual TFR is not well regulated, the simulated TFRs for the pre-1973 periods cannot match actual China for each year of the time series but to match on the average over the periods. It is why for pre-1960 periods, the blue line is above the black line while for the periods of1960-1970, the blue line is below the black line. Our conjecture on the reason for the irregular pattern of actual China in pre-1973 periods is that the government had been in a population policy struggling during this period [ 44 ] and the after-effect of the great fluctuations caused by China's Great Leap Forward famine (1958–1962). For example, right after the promotion of birth control policy in 1957, the birth control was catalyzed as anti-government in 1958. Not until 1962, birth control was encouraged again. Such changes of direction of the policy were very hard to simulate by finding the best comparable. Additionally, we identify the official announcement of "Later-Longer-Fewer Policy" in 1973 as the "shock." The informal introduction of such an idea started from 1971 when the encouragement of birth control was included as a "national" strategic policy. But only until 1973, the policy was announced officially with details. This explains why the SynthChina with FP 73&79 is already above actual China in 1973.

One interesting observation is that the TFR of Synth China with 1973 shock but without 1979 shock is lower than the observed TFR since 2003. Combining with the fact that the TFR reported in the Sixth Census in 2010 is lower than the TFR of Synth China, this appears to be providing indirect evidence on the common suspicion that the statistics on fertility rate might be “too low” and therefore the fertility effect of the 1979 policy could have been overstated.

Next, we apply the permutation test to evaluate the significance and robustness of the estimations. To do this, we produce a simulated sample of 500 countries by randomly drawing with replacement from the actual sample of 63 countries with China being excluded. Each country is treated as if it were China and is subjected to the 1973 and 1979 shocks. We construct the synthetic TFRs by following the same procedure carried out for Synth China. For each year, we calculate 500 simulated gaps between actual and synthetic TFRs, as shown in Fig 2 . The gaps for the simulated countries are represented by the grey lines, while the 95% confidence intervals by the red lines. The solid line denotes the gap between actual and Synth China, which is well below the lower bound of the 95% confidence interval from 1973 to 1979, indicating a significant reduction impact from the 1973 shock ( Fig 2 ). Meanwhile, the TFR gap between actual and Synth China stays within the confidence interval from 1980 onwards, implying that the 1979 shock had no significant impact ( Fig 2 ).

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(A)Permutation test with 1973 policy–gap between true TFR and synthetic TFR. (B) Permutation test with 1979 policy–gap between true TFR and synthetic TFR.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0220170.g002

Population projection is carried out by using Spectrum 10 , wherein the actual TFR was replaced by the synthetic TFR from 1979 to 2015.

As Fig 1 and Fig 2 show, had China not implemented its later-longer-fewer set of population control measures in 1973, the fall in TFR would have been much shallower. Translating this into total population, this would amount to a difference of around 85 million by the end of the 1970s ( Fig 3 ). The impact of the second ‘shock,' namely the introduction of the stricter control measures in 1979, appears to be much more muted. While there are differences in the 1980s as a result of the reform involving the regulation on marriage age, the TFR for Synth China and actual China are broadly in sync from the early 1990s. In terms of total population difference, Synth China is some 70 million lower than actual China by 2015, as shown in Fig 3 . As discussed above, this puzzling outcome of the second shock might be due to the overstating tendency of the fertility statistics. Based on the permutation tests shown in Fig 2 , we can conclude that the 1973 policy significantly reduced the population by 85 million, while the 1979 policy does not have a statistically significant impact.

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https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0220170.g003

Furthermore, we use a bootstrap strategy to get the confidence interval for the population estimates assuming without the shock of 1973 policy. We randomly drew 500 sub-samples with the size of 90% of the original sample without replacement. For each sub-sample, we repeated the synthetic control approach to search for the best synthetic China in terms of TFR. Among the 500 subsamples, two samples cannot converge. Therefore, in the end, we have 498 Synthetic China. We further get the 5% lower and upper bounds of TFRs among simulated Synthetic China. Building on the 5% lower and upper bounds of TFRs, we further calculate the resulted population, with which to compare the actual population and get the corresponding reduced population. The lower and upper bounds of the reduced population serve as the 90% confidence interval of Synthetic China in terms of the population without 1973 policy shock. The corresponding reduction of the population associated with the 1973 policy is between 60 and 94 million.

As shown in Table 2 , the countries used to construct Synth China differed significantly between the 1973 and 1979 shocks. Before the 1973 shock, the greatest contribution was made by India (with a weight of 36.9%), a country that implemented a weaker family planning system and was characterized by high fertility throughout the 1970s [ 45 ]. Jordan, Thailand, Ireland, Egypt, and Korea came as the second to the sixth most comparable countries to China. All of them, except Ireland, had family planning policies. Jordan started family planning measures in the 1980s [ 46 ]; Thailand had done three rounds of family planning measures starting from 1963 to 1980 [ 47 ]; Egypt implemented three rounds of family planning measures in 1966, 1970, and 1979 [ 48 ]; and the family planning policy started in Korea in 1961 and lasted until the 1980s [ 49 ]. Even without any institutional background information, the synthetic control model has been able to select countries with family planning programs automatically.

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https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0220170.t002

In the period 1973 to 1979, Korea overtook India as the country that most resembled China (75.2%). While the GDP per capita was considerably different between these two countries in this period (even in the current period), in the 1980s, they shared similarities in terms of the other variables not included in the model, including the GDP growth rate and the presence of an authoritarian political regime [ 50 , 51 ]. Furthermore, the Korean family planning system was extraordinarily comprehensive and was founded on new social norms around family size, as well as the development of rural areas in general [ 52 ]. Thailand still played an important role with a contribution of 16% to Synth China.

Robustness check

We further carried out several robustness checks by including the add-on policy intervention or altering the data coverage.

We examined first the impact of the commonly acknowledged temporary relaxation of the one-child policy during the late 1980s until the beginning of 1990s by using 1991 as another intervention year (Table B and Fig A in S1 File ). No significant impact was found.

A second robustness check done was performed by extending the coverage of the dataset. The baseline dataset of 64 countries used in the analysis was constructed by excluding countries with any missing value for the input and output variables from 1955 to 2010. Therefore, there is a possibility that countries sharing great similarities with China were excluded because of unavailable GDP per capita data in 1955 and onwards. The GDP per capita data were obtained from PWT 9.0, which is mostly accepted as one of the most reliable and complete sources of GDP data, especially when comparison across countries is required. To examine whether such exclusions would alter our conclusion, we revised our data construction by relaxing the time coverage requirement and allowing an unbalanced dataset for each shock. That is, if the input variables of a country for the required years by the Synthetic Control Method were available, we included it in the dataset. For example, countries previously excluded from our baseline model because of missing data on GDP per capita from 1955 to 1964 were included for assessing the impact of 1973 shock, and the availability of the GDP per capita data was only required from 1965 to 1973. It resulted in a dataset containing 103 countries for the 1973 shock and 123 countries for the 1979 shock (Tables C and D in S1 File ). Consistent with our baseline results, there was a significant decline in the TFR associated with the 1973 shock but insignificant impact with the 1979 shock (Table E and Fig B in S1 File ).

The final main robustness check done is restricting the coverage of countries in the dataset. We selected 25 countries as a focus group that had been subjectively recognized by previous literature as having similar fertility behavior as China (Table F in S1 File ). The focus group dataset with available data consisted of 17 countries for the 1973 shock and 20 countries for the 1979 shock. India, Indonesia, and Thailand were selected for Synth China in evaluating the 1973 shock and Korea, and Thailand was selected for Synth China in evaluating the 1979 shock, which was fewer than in our baseline analysis (Table G in S1 File ). Interestingly, the permutation test showed that even for the 1973 shock, the gap between the TFR of Synth China and actual TFR is located within the 95% interval. This indicates the insignificant impact of the 1973 shock. However, since there were only 16 countries used to do the random draw for the 500 paths, the variation contained in the permutation test is very limited, which weakened the reliability of the test (Fig C in S1 File ). The lower bound of the 95% confidence interval was dominated by Korea. Korea experienced a much sharper decline in TFR in the 1970s. Excluding Korea, China had the largest gap in the TFR.

As a robustness check, we also replace the TFRs used in our analysis with the UN-provided interpolated annual TFRs. The result is consistent with our baseline findings (see Table H and Fig D in S1 File ).

Limitations and conclusions

Of course, our study has various limitations. Firstly, from a data perspective, it is arguable that the veracity evidence derived for China–and, indeed, reconstructed for other countries–over the past seven decades is to be open to interpretation. This potential challenge is acknowledged and would, indeed, affect any and all studies of Chinese population history. However, the main argument of the likely impact of these two shocks still holds. Secondly, by considering China as a national unit, we do not disaggregate and consider the impact of the interventions (and policy differentials) at the sub-national unit. For example, it may be that the 1979 intervention had a more significant impact in one province than in others, dependent on the social and economic conditions of that region, coupled with the particular ‘history’ of birth control policies there. By considering only the aggregate level, we lose this granularity. Such an exercise would be a fruitful future avenue of research. The final criticism is a more holistic one. Is the size, complexity, the political, and economic system of China so unique that it is possible to create a ‘synthetic China’ at all? For sure, China is ‘different’ to most, if not all, countries of the world. However, the principle of the synthetic control approach is simply to draw similarities from other places if and where they exist. In this way, such an approach is more systematic, transparent, and viable than simply drawing on a single country comparator or a basket of other regions. Indeed, it could be argued that all possible units of analysis (countries, regions, towns) are ‘unique’ in their own way.

In this paper, we used the synthetic control method to assess the impact of the "One-Child" policy in China. Our findings strongly suggest that had China followed a standard development trajectory combined with the continuation of its comprehensive population control policies introduced in 1973 (‘later-longer-fewer'), the decline in the TFR and hence total population size would have been similar under the conditions of the stricter one-child policy and its various reforms thereafter. While the policies implemented in 1973 were restrictive in terms of spacing, timing and the quantum total number of children, and were also stricter than almost any other contemporary family planning program, they were, undoubtedly, less restrictive than what followed.

The implications of this study are two-fold. Firstly, by suggesting that the impact of the birth control policies may have been exaggerated in the past, we can better understand why the response to their relaxation has been relatively muted–or, at least, well below popular expectation. Secondly: it is impossible to ignore the fact that the strict birth control policies introduced in 1979 brought with them numerous negative and possibly unforeseen consequences. As well as the sanctioned activities and corrupt abuses which occurred within the birth control policy framework, the policies have been linked to the highly skewed sex ratio [ 53 ], the presence of millions of shidu fumu families who have lost their only child [ 54 ] as well as other challenges in both the development of family systems and individual behavior. The long-term psychological consequences of prioritizing one-child families have yet to be fully explored, not least in the context of possible efforts to spur childbearing in the future.

In this context, our analysis suggests that the population control policies implemented from 1979 have no significant demographic effect compared to a looser operationalization of population control and economic development. An important lesson for other countries that are planning to introduce population controls: the stricter controls might not be the effective one.

Supporting information

S1 file. appendix..

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0220170.s001

S2 File. Program and data.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0220170.s002

Acknowledgments

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this paper are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views and policies of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank. The authors are responsible for any remaining errors in the paper.

The authors would like to thank Ma. Christina F. Epetia for her excellent research assistance.

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China's one-child policy - success or failure?

  • Published 25 September 2010

A father takes a photograph of his baby girl being held in her mother's arms at a park in Beijing

During the period that I grew up in China in the 1960s and 70s, Chinese families could have as many children as they liked. Many had four or five children. Some even had six or seven.

My parents had four children. After the government started enforcing the rule of one child per family - often forcibly - my parents would sometimes jokingly remind me that I was an "exceeded quota person", meaning that under the one-child policy I would not have existed.

Chairman Mao, who led China from 1949 until his death in 1976, regarded a fast-growing population as a productive force necessary for China to become a great power.

He treated brutally those who dared to question him and believed that China should control its population.

His successor Deng Xiaoping started to reverse the trend.

He felt the tremendous drag China's huge population had on its fragile economic recovery after years of political turmoil.

On 25 September 1980, the Politburo of the Communist Party issued an "open letter" to all members of the party and the Communist youth league, urging them to take the lead in having only one child.

This is widely seen as the beginning of the controversial one-child policy.

The government claims that the policy has helped the country achieve 400 million fewer births during the past 30 years.

But this has come at a painful cost - keenly felt by my generation and those after us.

One of my childhood friends, who didn't want to reveal his name, has had to let his daughter, his second child, call him uncle in order to escape punishment for breaking the rule.

He says it breaks his heart every time he talks about his daughter, who is officially registered as someone else's child.

A female friend, like countless other young couples in China, had to pay a large fine for having a second child. But she believed the money was worth it.

Falling fertility

Officials have repeatedly stressed that this "fundamental policy of the state", which has been credited with helping reduce the pressure of population growth on society and economic development, will continue.

But the government has already been challenged over whether the 400 million fewer births were entirely due to the implementation of this policy.

Elderly Chinese people on exercise machines at a home for the elderly in Jiangsu province

A team of independent Chinese and foreign academics completed what they said was the first systematic examination of the one-child policy three years ago.

They pointed out that the reduction was mainly due to a fall in the fertility rate (the number of children a woman is expected to have in her lifetime) in the 1970s when the government began to encourage delayed marriages, longer intervals between births and fewer children.

According to Professor Wang Feng of the University of California, who led the study, China's fertility rate was reduced from more than five to just over two before family planning policy was introduced in 1978.

The debate over whether the one-child policy is still needed was recently stirred up by a newspaper report about the little publicised case of Yicheng county, in the northern province of Shanxi.

Yicheng has been experimenting with a two-child policy for 25 years, said The Southern Weekend, a liberal newspaper based in the southern city of Guangzhou, close to Hong Kong.

Despite its more relaxed regulations, the county has a lower than average population growth rate, the report said.

After three decades, the drawbacks of the one-child policy are more and more apparent.

Even though China still has the largest population in the world, a report last month by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, a leading government think tank, said officials were seriously overestimating the fertility rate.

Instead of suppressing it, the report said the government should try to lift it. More and more people in China, largely in urban areas, prefer to have fewer children.

It is unclear when Beijing might end the one-child policy. But attention will be focused on an upcoming meeting of the party central committee next month.

It will finalise a five-year social and economic development plan, only the 12th since the Communist Party took power in 1949.

Clearly, the situation is becoming urgent. Already the country's population is ageing fast. The first children born under the one-child policy face the prospect of caring for an ever-increasing number of pensioners.

China also faces the daunting prospect of many men who can't find wives as many female foetuses have been aborted, resulting in a huge gender imbalance.

The clock is ticking.

More on this story

China's pension system waltzes into crisis

  • Published 14 September 2010

China faces growing sex imbalance

  • Published 11 January 2010

China: Population

  • Published 2 October 2009

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CDC plans to drop five-day covid isolation guidelines

one child policy case study

Americans who test positive for the coronavirus no longer need to routinely stay home from work and school for five days under new guidance planned by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The agency is loosening its covid isolation recommendations for the first time since 2021 to align it with guidance on how to avoid transmitting flu and RSV, according to four agency officials and an expert familiar with the discussions.

CDC officials acknowledged in internal discussions and in a briefing last week with state health officials how much the covid-19 landscape has changed since the virus emerged four years ago, killing nearly 1.2 million people in the United States and shuttering businesses and schools. The new reality — with most people having developed a level of immunity to the virus because of prior infection or vaccination — warrants a shift to a more practical approach, experts and health officials say.

“Public health has to be realistic,” said Michael T. Osterholm, an infectious-disease expert at the University of Minnesota. “In making recommendations to the public today, we have to try to get the most out of what people are willing to do. … You can be absolutely right in the science and yet accomplish nothing because no one will listen to you.”

The CDC plans to recommend that people who test positive for the coronavirus use clinical symptoms to determine when to end isolation. Under the new approach, people would no longer need to stay home if they have been fever-free for at least 24 hours without the aid of medication and their symptoms are mild and improving, according to three agency officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share internal discussions.

Here is the current CDC guidance on isolation and precautions for people with covid-19

The federal recommendations follow similar moves by Oregon and California . The White House has yet to sign off on the guidance that the agency is expected to release in April for public feedback, officials said. One agency official said the timing could “move around a bit” until the guidance is finalized.

Work on revising isolation guidance has been underway since last August but was paused in the fall as covid cases rose. CDC director Mandy Cohen sent staff a memo in January that listed “Pan-resp guidance-April” as a bullet point for the agency’s 2024 priorities.

Officials said they recognized the need to give the public more practical guidelines for covid-19, acknowledging that few people are following isolation guidance that hasn’t been updated since December 2021. Back then, health officials cut the recommended isolation period for people with asymptomatic coronavirus from 10 days to five because they worried essential services would be hobbled as the highly transmissible omicron variant sent infections surging. The decision was hailed by business groups and slammed by some union leaders and health experts.

Covid is here to stay. How will we know when it stops being special?

The plan to further loosen isolation guidance when the science around infectiousness has not changed is likely to prompt strong negative reaction from vulnerable groups, including people older than 65, those with weak immune systems and long-covid patients, CDC officials and experts said.

Doing so “sweeps this serious illness under the rug,” said Lara Jirmanus, a clinical instructor at Harvard Medical School and a member of the People’s CDC, a coalition of health-care workers, scientists and advocates focused on reducing the harmful effects of covid-19.

Public health officials should treat covid differently from other respiratory viruses, she said, because it’s deadlier than the flu and increases the risk of developing long-term complications . As many as 7 percent of Americans report having suffered from a slew of lingering covid symptoms, including fatigue, difficulty breathing, brain fog, joint pain and ongoing loss of taste and smell, according to the CDC.

The new isolation recommendations would not apply to hospitals and other health-care settings with more vulnerable populations, CDC officials said.

While the coronavirus continues to cause serious illness, especially among the most vulnerable people, vaccines and effective treatments such as Paxlovid are available. The latest versions of coronavirus vaccines were 54 percent effective at preventing symptomatic infection in adults, according to data released Feb. 1, the first U.S. study to assess how well the shots work against the most recent coronavirus variant. But CDC data shows only 22 percent of adults and 12 percent of children had received the updated vaccine as of Feb. 9, despite data showing the vaccines provide robust protection against serious illness .

Coronavirus levels in wastewater i ndicate that symptomatic and asymptomatic infections remain high. About 20,000 people are still hospitalized — and about 2,300 are dying — every week, CDC data show. But the numbers are falling and are much lower than when deaths peaked in January 2021 when almost 26,000 people died of covid each week and about 115,000 were hospitalized.

The lower rates of hospitalizations were among the reasons California shortened its five-day isolation recommendation last month , urging people to stay home until they are fever-free for 24 hours and their symptoms are mild and improving. Oregon made a similar move last May.

California’s state epidemiologist Erica Pan said the societal disruptions that resulted from strict isolation guidelines also helped spur the change. Workers without sick leave and those who can’t work from home if they or their children test positive and are required to isolate bore a disproportionate burden. Strict isolation requirements can act as a disincentive to test when testing should be encouraged so people at risk for serious illness can get treatment, she said.

Giving people symptom-based guidance, similar to what is already recommended for flu, is a better way to prioritize those most at risk and balance the potential for disruptive impacts on schools and workplaces, Pan said. After Oregon made its change, the state has not experienced any disproportionate increases in community transmission or severity, according to data shared last month with the national association representing state health officials.

California still recommends people with covid wear masks indoors when they are around others for 10 days after testing positive — even if they have no symptoms — or becoming sick. “You may remove your mask sooner than 10 days if you have two sequential negative tests at least one day apart,” the California guidance states.

It’s not clear whether the updated CDC guidance will continue to recommend masking for 10 days.

Health officials from other states told the CDC last week that they are already moving toward isolation guidelines that would treat the coronavirus the same as flu and RSV, with additional precautions for people at high risk, said Anne Zink, an emergency room physician and Alaska’s chief medical officer.

Many other countries, including the United Kingdom, Denmark, Finland, Norway and Australia, made changes to isolation recommendations in 2022. Of 16 countries whose policies California officials reviewed, only Germany and Ireland still recommend isolation for five days, according to a presentation the California public health department gave health officials from other states in January. The Singapore ministry of health, in updated guidance late last year, said residents could “return to normal activities” once coronavirus symptoms resolve.

Even before the Biden administration ended the public health emergency last May, much of the public had moved on from covid-19, with many people having long given up testing and masking, much less isolating when they come down with covid symptoms.

Doctors say the best way for sick people to protect their communities is to mask or avoid unnecessary trips outside the home.

“You see a lot of people with symptoms — you don’t know if they have covid or influenza or RSV — but in all three of those cases, they probably shouldn’t be at Target, coughing, and looking sick,” said Eli Perencevich, an internal medicine professor at the University of Iowa.

Coronavirus: What you need to know

New covid variant: The United States is in the throes of another covid-19 uptick and coronavirus samples detected in wastewater suggests infections could be as rampant as they were last winter. JN.1, the new dominant variant , appears to be especially adept at infecting those who have been vaccinated or previously infected. Here’s how this covid surge compares with earlier spikes .

Covid ER visits rise: Covid-19, flu and RSV are rebounding in the United States ahead of the end-of-year holidays, with emergency room visits for the three respiratory viruses collectively reaching their highest levels since February.

New coronavirus booster: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends that anyone 6 months or older get an updated coronavirus shot , but the vaccine rollout has seen some hiccups , especially for children . Here’s what you need to know about the new coronavirus vaccines , including when you should get it.

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Case Study: China

The Chinese government introduced the ‘One Child Policy’ in 1979. The aim of this policy was to attempt to control population growth. The policy limited couples to one child. Under this policy couples have to gain permission from family planning officials for each birth.

If families followed this policy they received free education, health care, pensions and family benefits. These are taken away if the couple have more than one child.

The benefits of this policy are that the growth rate of China’s population has declined. Without the policy it is estimated that there would be an extra 320 million more people in a country whose population is estimated to be 1.3 billion.

The scheme has caused a number of problems in China. This is particularly the case for hundreds of thousands of young females. Many thousands of young girls have been abandoned by their parents as the result of the one child policy. Many parents in China prefer to have a boy to carry on the family name. As a result large numbers of girls have either ended up in orphanages, homeless or in some cases killed. Also, 90% of foetuses aborted in China are female.

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  1. The one-child policy in China

    The initiative The Chinese central government officially established the "one-child policy" in 1979 , although several initiatives for birth control had already been in place since the early 1970s and had already achieved significant reductions in the national birth rate.

  2. PDF China's One Child Policy

    Kessen 1975 is a trip report made by a delegation of American child psychologists who visited China in 1973, prior to the start of the one-child policy. Whyte 2003 presents analyses based upon a survey of parent-adult child relations in a middle range Chinese city in 1994. Lau 1996 is a collection of essays on contemporary patterns of child-

  3. Assessing the impact of the "one-child policy" in China: A synthetic

    We find that while the earlier, less restrictive 'later-longer-fewer' policy introduced in 1973 played a critical role in driving down the fertility rate, the role of the 'one-child policy' introduced in 1979 and its descendants was much less significant.

  4. The Social and Sociological Consequences of China's One-Child Policy

    INTRODUCTION China's one-child policy is perhaps the largest social engineering project in human history. Introduced in 1979, and ended in 2015, the policy was one of the most dominant forces shaping Chinese social life in its nearly four decades of existence.

  5. China's One-Child Policy

    Introduction In 1979 China's "one-child-per-couple" policy, or one-child policy, was launched. The policy was part of a multifaceted reform program pursued by the new regime under Deng Xiaoping, and its goal was to limit young, childbearing-age couples to only one child or, failing that, two children.

  6. Family Size and Children's Education: Evidence from the One-Child

    Using a novel and more accurate taxonomy of provincial OCP regulations and studying exclusively post-compulsory schooling outcomes of children that are subject to parental discretion, we find evidence for a sizeable child quantity-quality trade-off in China. Various robustness checks corroborate this conclusion.

  7. The Evolution of China's One-Child Policy and Its Effects on Family

    public policy (as emphasized by Besley and Case 2000). For example, regional varia- ... one-child policy on fertility and how it might affect human capital investment in children. Numerous studies have considered these two effects, but research on other potentially important effects of the one-child policy in China, including its ...

  8. China's One-Child Policy: How and How Well Has it Worked? A Case Study

    JIALI LI SINCE THE ESTABLISHMENT of the People's Republic in 1949, the Chinese gov- ernment has attempted to impose effective control over almost every as- pect of people's lives. In 1979, the one-child-per-family policy was intro- duced in order to further control the population growth rate.

  9. Abolishing the One-Child Policy: Stages, Issues and the Political

    For previous articles on policy change: Mara Hvistendahl, 'Has China Outgrown the One-Child Policy?', Science 329, (2010), pp. 1458-1461; Stuart Basten and Quanbao Jiang, 'China's Family Planning Policies: Recent Reforms and Future Prospects', Studies in Family Planning 45(4), (2014), pp. 493-509; Zhongwei Zhao, 'Closing a ...

  10. China's One Child Policy

    It said that: Couples must not marry until their late 20s. Most have only one successful pregnancy. Must be sterilised after the first child or abort any future pregnancies. Would receive a 5-10% salary rise for limiting their family to one child. The punishments for disobeying the rules were: A 10% salary cut

  11. The one-child policy: A macroeconomic analysis

    The results suggest that introducing the one-child policy promotes the accumulation of human capital and increases per capita output. These findings are consistent with the suggestions in the literature. 3 See, for example, Bloom et al. (2000) and Li and Zhang (2007).Unsurprisingly, introducing the policy also results in an older population.

  12. China's one-child policy: what was it and what impact did it have

    China's one-child policy was rolled out in 1980 and was strictly enforced with various punishments before being replaced by a two-child policy in January 2016 and a three-child policy in May 2021.

  13. China's One-Child Policy, a Policy without a Future

    China's One-Child Policy, a Policy without a Future Pitfalls of the "Common Good" Argument and the Authoritarian Model Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 May 2014 JING-BAO NIE Article Metrics Get access Cite Rights & Permissions Abstract:

  14. One Child, Only Hope? No More: The Evolution of China's ...

    First Online: 26 November 2019 745 Accesses Abstract This chapter begins with a historical overview of China's family planning policies, including the One-Child Policy, and the Universal Two-Child Policy, elucidating the historical, social, and political context of the implementation.

  15. Assessing the impact of the "one-child policy" in China: A synthetic

    The one-child policy was further loosened in 2013 when it was announced that two children would be allowed if one parent is an only child . ... Diamond A, Hainmueller J, Synthetic control methods for comparative case studies: Estimating the effect of California's Tobacco Control Program. J Am Stat Assoc. 105, 493-505 (2012). View Article

  16. One-child policy

    On September 25, 1980, a public letter—published by the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party to the party membership—called upon all to adhere to the one-child policy, and that date has often been cited as the policy's "official" start date.

  17. China's One-Child Policy: Population Control and Its Unintended

    In 1979, the Chinese government established the one-child policy, the most severe state-mandated family planning policy in the world. This policy was intended to curb rapid population growth in China by prohibiting couples from having more than one child. The policy was implemented in varying degrees across provinces and affected urban and rural areas differently.

  18. China's one-child policy

    The debate over whether the one-child policy is still needed was recently stirred up by a newspaper report about the little publicised case of Yicheng county, in the northern province of Shanxi.

  19. The One-child Policy and Gender Bias in China: A Review of Recent

    The one-child policy, according to Andrew Mullen, China's one-child policy requires most couples to have only one child. China's one-child policy was rolled out in 1980 by Deng Xiaoping and was strictly enforced after the population had increased to 969 million in 1980 from around 540 million in 1949. The policy is implemented by the National Health and Family Planning Commission.

  20. A country with a rate of high population growth

    In 1979 the Chinese government introduces the One-Child Policy, designed to limit population growth. How did China's One-Child Policy aim to reduce the rate of population growth? Couples were encouraged to have only one child in return for financial and welfare benefits. Men could not get married until they were 22 and women 20.

  21. How China Miscalculated Its Way to a Baby Bust

    The rapid shift under way today wasn't projected by the architects of China's one-child policy—one of the biggest social experiments in history, instituted in 1980. At the time, governments ...

  22. CASE STUDY: CHINA'S ONE CHILD POLICY

    1. CHINA's ONE CHILD POLICY EXAM CASE STUDY AS GEOGRAPHY - POPULATION. 2. SYLLABUS This case study follows precisely the Cambridge AS 2019 syllabus requests for one of the "Population" case studies. Candidates must study one country's population policy regarding natural increase, showing the difficulties faced and evaluate the ...

  23. One Child Policy Case Study Flashcards

    One Child Policy Case Study introduced Click the card to flip 👆 1980 Click the card to flip 👆 1 / 9 Flashcards Learn Test Match Created by daisydo123 Terms in this set (9) introduced 1980 why (t,u,m) to decrease and slow down the growth of the Chinese population, unsustainable br, minimize pressure on social services policy one child per couple

  24. CDC plans to drop five-day covid isolation guidelines

    The latest versions of coronavirus vaccines were 54 percent effective at preventing symptomatic infection in adults, according to data released Feb. 1, the first U.S. study to assess how well the ...

  25. Case Study: China

    The Chinese government introduced the 'One Child Policy' in 1979. The aim of this policy was to attempt to control population growth. The policy limited couples to one child. Under this policy couples have to gain permission from family planning officials for each birth.

  26. Treatment for childhood and adolescent dissociation: A systematic review

    One case study demonstrated the effect that 24 weekly sessions of EMDR therapy had on an adolescent boy with dissociative symptoms (Papanikolopoulos et al., 2017). Similar to the others, this case study outlined the initial stage of EMDR therapy was to establish stabilization, and then shift to skill building.