Should China keep its one child policy? - Part I

The one child policy, known in China as "birth planning" was started in 1980 and is considered one of the world's most ambitious control measures of population. The aim was to decrease the population and increase China's development by limiting the birth rate and thus decreasing the number of people to feed. A third of the population (urban families) were forced to follow this with rural familes allowed to have two. It was orignially intended to last no more than a generation, but now thirty years later it is the children of the policy now subject to it and the policy's future is in their hands.

As a policy it can be considered a success. In 1979 the average fertility rate was 2.9, now it has had a large decrease to 1.7. The government claims to prevented around 400 million births, meaning China's populace is 1.3 billion rather than 1.7. This decrease in birth rates has helped show what demographists call "the demographic dividend"- a phase in the population structure where the number of workers is higher than the number of young and old people in need of care. This occurs in all industrialised societies, but most dramatically in China which the savings made from its workforce have gone into fuelling its enormous ecenomic growth. This has howver come at a price.

A cost of the policy has been had by people trying to have more children than they are allowed. Government officials levy large fines, £20,000 on parents producing more than the quota allows. This isn't too much of a problem for rich parents, who can buy their way out of this, but the poorer offenders often lose their jobs. The policy has also resulted in vast numbers of infanticide, millions of late term abortions (many late term and self performed) and forced sterilisations for persistent offenders as well as the problems for China in the long term.

One such long term problem is China becoming known as the "land of the little Emperors", a ruling generation of single children who have become spoilt due to lack of siblings. Perhaps more serious is the large gender imbalance. In Asian culture there is often a preference for sons over daughters, partly due to the cost of marrying a daughter off. The prefernce means that 120 boys are born for every 100 girls, and as a result by 2020 there could be around 30million bachelors unable to find a partner (more details next week). Although China has benefited from the "demographic divedend" for the last 30 years it may not do so well in the long run with not enough children to support both their parents and their grandparents, causing major ecenomic difficulties. Part II of "Should China keep its one child policy?" out on Sunday...