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China's Former 1-Child Policy Continues To Haunt Families

The legacy of China's one-child rule is still painfully felt by many of those who suffered for having more children. Ran Zheng for NPR hide caption

The legacy of China's one-child rule is still painfully felt by many of those who suffered for having more children.

Editor's note: This story contains descriptions that may be disturbing.

LINYI, China — Outside, rain falls. Inside, a middle-school student completes his homework. His mother watches him approvingly.

She is especially protective of him. He's the youngest of three children this mother had under China's one-child policy.

Giving birth to him was a huge risk — and she took no chances. She carried her son to term while hiding in a relative's house. She wanted to avoid the "family planning officials" in her home village, just outside Linyi, a city of 11 million in China's northern Shandong province, where the policy's enforcement was especially violent.

What was she hiding from? What could the family planning officials have done to her? She demurs, her voice growing quiet. "All we can do is go on living," she says. "There is no use in trying to make sense of society."

A mother and a grandmother take care of a child in Beijing on Jan. 1, 2016. Married couples in China in 2016, were allowed to have two children, after concerns over an aging population and shrinking workforce ushered in an end to the country's controversial one-child policy. Fred Dufour/AFP via Getty Images hide caption

Her son is part of the last generation of children in China whose births were ruled illegal at the time. Anxious that rapid population growth would strain the country's welfare systems and state-planned economy, the Chinese state began limiting how many children families could have in the late 1970s.

The limit in most cases was just one child. Then in 2016, the state allowed two children. And in May, after a new census showed the birth rate had slowed, China raised the cap to three children. State media celebrated the news.

But the legacy of the one-child rule is still painfully felt by many parents who suffered for having multiple children. For some, the pain is still too much to bear.

"It has been so many years, and I have let the pain go," the mother of three says, eyes downcast. "If you carry it with you all the time, it gets too tiring."

A mother's quandary

One night in August 2008, the mother made a fateful decision. Her body was giving her all the telltale signs that she was pregnant — again.

She already had two children and had gone through four abortions afterward, to avoid paying the ruinously high "social maintenance fee" demanded from families as penalty when they contravened birth limits.

Medical staff massage babies at an infant care center in Yongquan, in Chongqing municipality, in southwest China, on Dec. 15, 2016. China had 1 million more births in 2016 than in 2015, following the end of the one-child policy. AFP via Getty Images hide caption

But this time she felt differently.

"I had already had two children but my heart just did not feel right," says the woman, now in her 50s, who works part time in a canning factory. NPR isn't using her name to protect her identity because of the trauma she suffered. "I thought this is it — if I do not have this child, my body will not be able to have any more."

Officials in her village were actively policing families under the one-child policy. Enforcement of the policy had begun to loosen by the early 2000s, as horrific stories of forced abortions and botched sterilizations caused policymakers to rethink the rule. But starting in 2005, the authorities began enforcing the policy with a renewed ferocity in Linyi.

So the mother went into hiding to carry her son to term. One night, family planning officials approached her husband, intending to pressure him and his wife into ending the pregnancy. He used a pickax to drive them off and was imprisoned for that for half a year.

An old friend of hers, the blind lawyer Chen Guangcheng , knows full well what she and tens of thousands of other women in Linyi city went through.

Chinese parents, who have children born outside the country's one-child policy, protest outside the family planning commission in an attempt to have their fines canceled in Beijing, on Jan. 5, 2016. For decades, China's family planning policy limited most urban couples to one child and rural couples to two if their first was a girl. Ng Han Guan/AP hide caption

"The doctors would inject poison directly into the baby's skull to kill it," Chen says, drawing on recordings he made of interviews with hundreds of women and their families in Linyi. "Other doctors would artificially induce labor. But some babies were alive when they were born and began crying. The doctors strangled or drowned those babies."

The terror of such enforcement of birth limits was widespread in Linyi, even if residents were not themselves planning on giving birth.

"Officials would kidnap you if you tried to have two children. If you were hiding and they could not find you, they would kidnap your elder relatives and make them stand in cold water, in the winter," remembers Lu Bilun, a resident.

Lu says the harassment became so savage that elderly residents of Linyi became afraid to leave their homes out of fear they might be kidnapped. Lu says he paid a 4,000 yuan fine to have his second son in 2006 (about $500 at the time), after hiding his wife for months. "This was not your average level of policy enforcement. It was vicious," he says.

Chen, the lawyer, mounted a class action lawsuit on behalf of Linyi's women. The suit led to an apology from the authorities in Linyi and a reduction in the kidnappings, beatings and forced abortions.

Children ride a toy train at a shopping mall in Beijing, on Oct. 30, 2015. China's decision to abolish its one-child policy offered some relief to couples and to sellers of baby-related goods, but the government hasn't lifted birth limits entirely. Andy Wong/AP hide caption

But the Chinese government punished Chen for his activism by imprisoning him, then trapping him for nearly three years in his home , in a village just outside Linyi.

In 2012, Chen escaped by scaling a wall and running to the next village, despite being blind and having broken his foot during the escape. There, he was picked up by supporters and driven to the U.S. Embassy in Beijing. He was able to fly to the U.S . after weeks of tense negotiation. Today, he lives in Maryland with his family.

The price of defiance

"The policy was wrong and what we did with Chen was right," says a neighbor of Chen, the lawyer who sued the city of Linyi. The man wants to remain unnamed because he believes he could be harassed again for speaking of that time.

In the 1990s, he says, family planning officials ambushed him in his home at night and beat him with sticks in an effort to convince his wife to abort their third son.

Chinese lawyer Chen Guangcheng attends a rally to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre June 4, 2019, at the West Lawn of the U.S. Capitol. Chen had been persecuted and detained in China after his work advising villagers and speaking out official abuses under the one-child rule. Alex Wong/Getty Images hide caption

"Our country's leaders did not want us to have children and I didn't know why, but we could not do anything about it," he sighs.

He and his wife persevered and had three sons. They did not officially register the last two to avoid paying a fine, but the father says he still paid a bribe to family planning officials to avoid further harassment. These economic penalties depleted his life savings, a financial impact that compounded over the ensuing years.

The policy permeates through Chinese society in other, sometimes unexpected ways. Because many prioritized having a son over a daughter, orphanages experienced a surge in baby girls who were abandoned or put up for adoption. Single's Day, China's biggest online shopping holiday — akin to Black Friday in the U.S. — is a recognition of the many bachelors who are unable to find partners in a gender-skewed society.

"A very unbalanced population gender-wise has also led to a rise in property prices in major cities because families of men have bought apartments to make their sons eligible in a marriage market where there are millions of missing women," says Mei Fong , who wrote a book on the one-child rule. "These effects will be felt in the generation ahead."

A child walks near government propaganda one of which reads "1.3 billion people united" on the streets of Beijing, China, Tuesday, March 8, 2016. Ng Han Guan/AP hide caption

According to the census conducted last year, the population is aging and there are fewer young children and working-age people, a major demographic shift that comes with its own economic strains. That's pushing policymakers to consider raising the official retirement age — currently 60 for men and 55 for women — for the first time in 40 years.

Yet the authorities still only allow couples to have three children. Why won't China remove all caps?

"Despite all the overwhelming demographic evidence, they're saying, 'We need to control you,'" says the author, Fong. Anxious about already strained public education and health care systems, China's leadership is reportedly considering ditching limits entirely. It has been slow to completely dismantle its massive family planning bureaucracy built up over the past four decades. And according to an Associated Press investigation , it continues to impose stricter controls over births — including forced sterilizations — among ethnic minorities, like the Turkic Uyghurs.

Some demographers in China argue that instituting birth limits was necessary for keeping birth rates low. But Stuart Gietel-Basten, a demographer at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, cautions there is no definitive answer. "There is only one China and there is only one one-child policy, so it is kind of impossible to say the real effect of that was [of the policy]," he says.

Families were already having fewer children in the 1970s, before the policy took force in 1979. "The one-child policy was not the only thing that happened in China in the 1980s and 1990s," Gietel-Basten says. "There was also rapid urbanization, economic growth, industrialization, female emancipation and more female labor force participation."

A man and a child are reflected on a glass panel displaying a tiger at the Museum of Natural History in Beijing, Dec. 2, 2016. Andy Wong/AP hide caption

It was worth the cost

The fact that the children are alive at all makes Chen, the lawyer, feel his seven years in prison and house arrest were all worth it.

"I really feel happy. Even if I had to go to prison and endure beatings, in the end, these children were able to survive. They must be in middle school or high school by now."

The mother of one of these middle schoolers holds her son close. Part of the reason she demurred when first speaking to NPR was because of how dearly her family fought for his birth.

Her worries these days are more mundane. She wants to start preparing for her son's marriage — a costly endeavor as rural families expect the husband to provide a material guarantee for any future wife.

"That requires buying them a car, an apartment. No one can afford that," she complains.

Her job at a nearby canning factory refuses to hire her full time, she says, because she is a mother of three and needs to leave every afternoon to pick up her son from school.

And so, ironically, now that people are allowed to have more children, they are increasingly reluctant to, because of the high cost of child care and education.

"Women have it all figured out now — they won't have more kids even when they're told to have more!" the mother laughs helplessly.

"People act in funny ways," she says. "There is no point in controlling them."

one-child policy
Chinese society
Chinese law
Chinese population

Was the One-Child Policy Ever a Good Idea?

China’s “one-child” policy has been relaxed, and now married couples may have two children. But according to scholars, the damage is already done.

A child sitting in front of a window on a bed

China’s infamous “one-child policy” came to an end in 2016, when family limits in the nation were raised to two children.

The policy was always controversial. Back in 2016, sociology scholars Wang Feng, Baochang Gu, and Yong Cai reported on drastic measures that had been taken to enforce the former policy , including an alleged 14 million abortions, 20.7 million sterilizations, and 17.8 million IUD insertions, many of which may have been involuntary.

The greatest irony of this is that the policy may have been a misguided measure from the start.

The restriction on family sizes was introduced in the 1980s. According to Feng et al., the policy was meant to be a temporary way to slow population expansion and facilitate economic growth at a time when the nation “faced severe shortages of capital, natural resources, and consumer goods.”

But many say China may have seen its much-desired decline in fertility happen naturally. Feng et al. note that “the answer to China’s underdevelopment did not come from its extreme birth control measures, but from reform policies that loosened state control over the economy.” They continue:

China’s economic boom over the last few decades has lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty, sent almost 100 million young men and women to college, and inspired generations of Chinese, both young and old, to purse their economic goals…Contrary to the claims of some Chinese officials, much of China’s fertility decline to date was realized prior to the launch of the one-child policy, under a much less strict policy in the 1970s calling for later marriage, longer birth intervals, and fewer births (Whyte, Wang, and Cai 2015). In countries that had similar levels of fertility in the early 1970s without extreme measures such as the one-child policy, fertility also declined, and some achieved a level similar to China’s today.

A decline in fertility rates often accompanies these cultural shifts, as families focus on careers, invest in education and gain access to family planning services.

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Moreover, according to the scholars, the harmful one-child policy lingered too long. The one-child policy became a part of a larger social conversation that “erroneously blamed population growth for virtually all of the country’s social and economic problems.” This is a cultural psychological belief that will take much more than a government act to reverse.

Additionally, The Guardian reports myriad negative reactions to the removal of the policy. According to the article, exhausted mothers can’t imagine enduring the pressures of having more than one child in China’s fast-paced, high-pressure environment. Some women who had their child and then went back to work are suddenly now seen as a liability in their workplaces again because they might now leave to have an additional child. Sociologist Ye Liu told The Guardian that women she had interviewed in China “feel like they were experiments of the state. They were the experiments [under the one-child policy] and now they are another experiment. They feel like they are forever being used by the state laboratory.” Plus, a struggling economy has some parents wondering what the point of bringing another child into the world would be. One parent is quoted as saying, “It’s not that I’m worried about [my son’s] future. I have no hope for it at all.”

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

Introduction, historical and cultural roots of china’s population, family, and child-rearing.

General Works on Population Trends and Policies after 1949
Prelude to the One-Child Policy: The 1970s and the “Later, Longer, Fewer” Campaign
Overviews of the One-Child Policy
How and Why the One-Child Policy Was Launched
Changing Policies and Enforcement in the One-Child Era
One-Child Policy Enforcement and Human Rights Abuses
The Advantages and Disadvantages of Being a Chinese Singleton
The Role of the One-Child Policy in China’s Dramatic Fertility Decline
Infant Abandonment, Orphanage Care, and Adoption of Abandoned Chinese Children
Distortion of Sex Ratios at Birth: Missing Girls and “Bare Sticks”
Looming Demographic Challenges: Rapid Population Aging and Young Worker Shortages
The Ending of the One-Child Policy in 2015
The Demographic, Historical, and Political Legacy of China’s One-Child Policy

Other Subject Areas

Forthcoming articles expand or collapse the "forthcoming articles" section.

Agency and Childhood
Childhood Publics
Children in Art History
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China's One Child Policy by Martin K. Whyte LAST REVIEWED: 19 April 2024 LAST MODIFIED: 19 April 2024 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199791231-0221

For centuries, China has had the world’s largest population, although it will soon lose that title to India. When Mao Zedong and his colleagues seized national power in 1949, they were not sure how many Chinese there were (the first modern census was not conducted until 1953), and Mao initially argued that having a large and rapidly increasing population was a blessing for China, rather than a curse. However, the challenges of managing such a large and poor country soon changed the official view, and during some intervals in the 1950s and 1960s, China carried out voluntary family planning campaigns to try to reduce the birth rate. However, those campaigns were largely ineffective, with the only notable decline in fertility during those decades produced by the Great Leap Forward–induced mass famine of 1959–1961, not family planning efforts. As of 1970 the projected number of babies the average Chinese mother would have in her lifetime (termed the total fertility rate [TFR]) was still close to six. (China’s cities, where less than 20 percent of the population lived at the time, is an exception to these generalizations, with the 1960s family planning campaign playing some role in reducing the urban TFR in 1970 to 3.2.) Early in the 1970s, when Mao was still in charge (he died in 1976), China made a dramatic shift from voluntary family planning to mandatory birth limits under the slogan, “later (marriage ages), longer (birth intervals), and fewer” (births—no more than two babies for urban families and three for rural families). The “later, longer, fewer” campaign was enforced very strictly, using many of the coercive measures that later became notorious during the one-child campaign, and China’s fertility rate fell dramatically, to less than three per mother by the end of the decade. Despite this success, in 1980 the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) launched an even more demanding and coercive campaign that attempted for the next thirty-five years to limit Chinese families to having only one child. The fertility rate actually went up in the early 1980s but then began to decline again, reaching sub-replacement fertility (TFR = 2.1) by the early 1990s. Most experts estimated that China’s TFR fluctuated in the 1.4 to 1.6 range between 2000 and 2015, although some analysts have calculated slightly higher estimates. (The subsequent decline in births, discussed in the final section of this essay, reduced China’s TFR in 2020 to 1.3 according to the census that year, approaching the very low fertility of the richest countries in East Asia.) The CCP in late 2015 decided to end the one-child limit, with Chinese families since January 1, 2016 allowed to have two children (raised to three children in 2021). Debates about the controversial one-child policy have spawned a large literature that examines many issues, including the reasons the CCP launched this campaign, how effective it was in reducing birth rates further, what human rights abuses resulted, how child-rearing and children have been affected, and in what ways Chinese society and the people of China have benefited or have been harmed by the demographic distortions produced by mandatory, state-enforced birth limits.

The backdrop for China’s unprecedented effort to enforce a one-child policy after 1980 is a strong set of family and child-rearing traditions stretching back millennia as well as debates about that country’s population dynamics and trends over the centuries. Baker 1979 presents a good summary of the literature on patterns of Chinese family life and kinship relations prior to 1949. Thornton and Lin 1994 provides an overview of family change patterns in Taiwan that can be compared with the literature on family change in mainland China. Ikels 2004 contains a series of essays focusing on the role of the central Chinese child-rearing value of filial piety in contemporary East Asian societies. Saari 1990 uses historical sources to convey how rising Western influence was challenging traditional child-rearing patterns and family authority relations in China around the turn of the 20th century. 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-rearing in the People’s Republic of China and in the Chinese diaspora. Taken together, these studies convey a picture of China’s traditional family patterns having changed in substantial ways prior to the launching of the one-child policy, but with families still displaying distinctive patterns even today compared with their counterparts in Western societies (e.g., with higher likelihood of living with parents after marriage). In terms of historical trends in China’s population size, Ho 1958 is an early account by a historian of patterns of growth of the Chinese population over many centuries prior to the 20th century. Hajnal 1982 presents data and theorizes in support of the conventional view that in premodern times families in northwestern Europe were distinctive compared to families in Asia, particularly by more rationally adjusting their fertility levels to prevailing economic conditions. More recently, Lee and Wang 1999 uses historical demographic records from Qing Dynasty China to challenge the Malthusian view of Chinese families advanced by Hajnal and others.

Baker, Hugh. Chinese Family and Kinship . New York: Columbia University Press, 1979.

DOI: 10.1007/978-1-349-86123-1

This is a wide-ranging overview by an experienced anthropological fieldworker of patterns of family life and kinship relations in China prior to 1949 and how they compare and contrast with family patterns in Western societies.

Hajnal, John. “Two Kinds of Preindustrial Household Formation System.” Population and Development Review 8 (1982): 449–494.

DOI: 10.2307/1972376

In this influential article, Hajnal presents data comparing premodern family patterns in England and other countries in northwestern Europe with their counterparts in Asia, including China, leading him to conclude that in Europe changing economic conditions led families to adjust their marriage rate, age at marriage, and fertility, whereas in Asian societies pronatal values and institutions did not promote such “rational” adjustments, thus encouraging more rapid population growth in the East than in the West.

Ho Ping-Ti. Studies on the Population of China, 1368–1958 . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958.

In this early study, a distinguished historian assembles such estimates as were available at the time to present an overview of when and why China’s population grew from less than 100 million at the start of the Ming Dynasty to about 600 million by the 1950s. More recent and accurate data have largely superseded this work.

Ikels, Charlotte, ed. Filial Piety: Practice and Discourse in Contemporary East Asia . Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004.

A set of essays, mostly by sociologists and anthropologists, detailing their investigations into what role the central Confucian value of filial piety (basically, the cultivation of extraordinary obligation and subordination by children even as adults to their parents and other elders) plays in contemporary East Asian societies, including China.

Kessen, William, ed. Childhood in China . New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1975.

In 1973 a delegation of a dozen distinguished American child psychologists visited China and provided this report on their observations in the preschools and primary and secondary schools they visited, although they were unsuccessful in their efforts to meet Chinese child psychologists with whom they could discuss their observations.

Lau Sing, ed. Growing Up the Chinese Way: Chinese Child and Adolescent Development . Hong Kong: Chinese University of Hong Kong Press, 1996.

This collection of essays, mainly by child and social psychologists, presents recent research studies on many different aspects of child-rearing, parent–child relations, and school performance in China. Two of the essays in this volume deal specifically with comparing only children and children reared with siblings, and those essays are cited later in this review ( Falbo, et al. 1996 ; Wu 1996 , both cited under the Advantages and Disadvantages of Being a Chinese Singleton ).

Lee, James, and Wang, Feng. One Quarter of Humanity: Malthusian Mythology and Chinese Realities . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999.

DOI: 10.4159/9780674040052

This prize-winning volume, by a historian and a demographer, analyzes data on Chinese family patterns and demographic behavior in the 19th century, leading to a revisionist view that even in premodern times, contra Hajnal and others, Chinese were as much or more “rational” in adjusting their childbearing to economic conditions than Western families and not more pronatal. The authors also contend that the share of the world’s population that is Chinese today is not any larger than it was 2000 years ago.

Saari, Jon. Legacies of Childhood: Growing Up Chinese in a Time of Crisis, 1890–1920 . Cambridge, MA: Harvard East Asian Monographs, 1990.

DOI: 10.2307/j.ctt1tg5mpf

A historian of China uses documentary and literary sources to examine the tensions and strains as Chinese parents and their children tried to adjust to rapid social change and Western influence at the turn of the 20th century.

Thornton, Arland, and Hui-Sheng Lin. Social Change and the Family in Taiwan . Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994.

The authors rely on multiple surveys conducted in Taiwan since the 1960s to present an overview of the patterns of change and continuity in Chinese family patterns on that island.

Whyte, Martin K., ed. China’s Revolutions and Intergenerational Relations . Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Center for Chinese Studies, 2003.

A collection of essays based upon a survey conducted in the city of Baoding, Hebei Province, in 1994. In that survey a representative sample of older residents and one randomly selected grown child of each older respondent were both interviewed to examine current patterns of relations between older urban Chinese and their adult offspring. Some essays include comparisons with comparable surveys that had been conducted earlier in Taiwan.

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The costs and benefits of China’s one-child policy

Researcher, ANU College of Asia and the Pacific, Australian National University

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Jane Golley does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

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The recent announcement that China’s one-child policy will be partially relaxed will be celebrated worldwide by libertarians, human rights activists and, most importantly, Chinese couples who have longed for larger families but dared not to face the consequences of doing so until now.

The shift in position from the Chinese government will allow urban couples to have two children if either the husband or wife is an only child. Many people will be hoping that the relaxation will go a step further by allowing all couples to have two children, or even by removing all state limits on family size some time soon.

Before joining this chorus of campaigners – who are almost certain to be disappointed – it may be worth reflecting first on some of the many costs and benefits of fertility decline (and hence, of the one-child policy).

The idea that a slowdown in the rate of population growth provides a boost to per capita income growth dates back to Thomas Malthus’ An essay on the principle of population , first published in 1798. This “population pessimism” was taken up by a number of development economists in the late 1950s. They asserted that fertility reductions - and the lower population growth - would be good for economic development.

Or, in other words, they argued that rapid population growth was a bad thing.

Mao Zedong did not buy into this argument, but was rather a “population optimist” who believed that “the more people we have, the stronger we will be”. Despite Mao’s views, the first three decades of Communist Party rule saw rapid fertility decline in China – precipitated by improvements in healthcare, female education, life expectancy and infant mortality, rather than strict family planning policies.

However, China’s population still increased by 400 million between 1949 and 1976, the year of Mao’s death. A growing recognition of a pending “population problem” (even by Mao himself) led to the “later, longer, fewer” policy in 1970. This called for later marriages, longer spaces between births and fewer children, and later led to the introduction of the one-child policy in 1979 .

The one-child policy has unquestionably caused fertility to decline more rapidly than it otherwise would have - with estimates of the number of “averted births” ranging from 250 to 400 million - and has therefore played a significant role in China’s demographic transition. As I discussed in a previous article , this transition may have delivered a substantial “demographic dividend” to the country, explaining up to one-quarter of its per capita GDP growth in the last three decades according to some estimates.

With that rapid GDP growth has come better nutrition, rising levels of education, longer life expectancies, and higher living standards for the vast majority of Chinese people. The one-child policy, however controversial, should be given some of the credit for these outcomes.

The possibility that many of those extra 400 million people - had they been born – may have joined the ranks of the 180 million Chinese people still living under US$1.25 today is also worth considering. So too are the challenges relating to environmental degradation and food security in the world’s most populous nation.

This is not to deny the substantial, and in many cases immeasurable, costs of the policy. Rapid fertility decline in the past has now placed China in the uniquely challenging position of “getting old before getting rich”. Aside from the obvious economic costs of having more dependents and fewer workers in the population, the policy places a huge burden on single Chinese children at the bottom of the resulting “4-2-1” family structure (four grandparents, two parents and one child).

Even more consequential is the dramatic rise in China’s sex ratio at birth, the costs of which will be borne by an estimated 30 million or more Chinese men who will be looking for a wife in 2030 but unable to find one . The one-child policy – in combination with a traditional preference for sons and widespread access to ultrasound technology to detect gender since the mid-1980s – is at least partly to blame.

Other significant emotional costs result from not being allowed to determine your family’s size, being coerced into terminating second pregnancies, or giving birth to a second child who is not allowed to enrol in school or to access the healthcare system. These are all costs that defy measurement by someone who has never suffered them.

As discussed in another recent article in The Conversation, the latest policy change is only likely to have a small impact on the actual number of births. This impact was estimated by demographer Wang Feng to be in the range of one to two million extra births on top of the 15 million or so children currently born each year.

However small, it should still be celebrated for the role it might play in reducing the costs of the one-child policy – past, present and future. But this does not amount to damning the one-child policy in its entirety. The issues are far too complex for that.

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Annual Review of Sociology

Volume 47, 2021, review article, the social and sociological consequences of china's one-child policy.

Yong Cai 1 , and Wang Feng 2
View Affiliations Hide Affiliations Affiliations: 1 Department of Sociology, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27599, USA; email: [email protected] 2 Department of Sociology, University of California, Irvine, California 92697, USA; email: [email protected]
Vol. 47:587-606 (Volume publication date July 2021) https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-soc-090220-032839
First published as a Review in Advance on April 26, 2021
Copyright © 2021 by Annual Reviews. All rights reserved

China's one-child policy is one of the largest and most controversial social engineering projects in human history. With the extreme restrictions it imposed on reproduction, the policy has altered China's demographic and social fabric in numerous fundamental ways in its nearly four decades (1979–2015) of existence. Its ramifications reach far beyond China's national borders and the present generation. This review examines the policy's social consequences through its two most commonly invoked demographic concerns: elevated sex ratio and rapid population aging. We place these demographic concerns within three broad social and political contexts of the policy—gender, family, and the state—to examine its social consequences. We also discuss the sociological consequences of the policy, by reflecting on the roles of science and social scientists in public policy making.

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12 Pros and Cons of China One Child Policy

China’s one child policy was a population planning policy that was introduced in 1979. It subjected about one-third of the country’s population to having only one child. If the policy was violated, the fines could be imposed on families. The Chinese government claims that this policy prevented more than 400 million births.

The one child policy of China was officially phased out in 2015.

The advantage of this policy was that many groups were either exempted or provided specific exceptions from the policy. Ethnic minorities could have more children and families who had a girl could be given an exception to have a second child. It was enforced at the provincial level and was enforced most often in urban environments that were densely populated.

The disadvantage is that the policy put the lives of children at risk. To avoid financially devastating fines, families who were having a second child and didn’t have an exemption would seek out abortion providers or abandon their children outright without identification. For families that wanted a boy and had a girl, this created numerous orphans and murders that were needless.

Here are some of the other pros and cons of the China one child policy to discuss.

The Pros of China’s One Child Policy

1. It was supported within the country. Countries should have the ability to dictate their own course of societal growth, even if other nations don’t always agree with the policies that are in place. 76% of the population in China supported the One Child Policy in surveys taken in 2006. Although some objections were based on the morality of restricting family size, there are families in other societies that voluntarily do the same thing that China mandated.

2. Multiple births were exempted. If families had twins or triplets, then the one child policy was not enforced for that pregnancy. A 2006 report in China Daily estimated that the number of pregnancies with multiples doubled during the time of enforcement for this policy. It may have also increased the number of families who sought to use fertility medication so they could have additional children without a financial penalty.

3. It changed the place of a woman in Chinese society. Because families were restricted to one child, it changed the traditional role of girls and women in Chinese society. Families who invest into their children, allowing girls to go to school, receive vocational supports, and additional training opportunities that may not have been allowed or encouraged in the past. This has allowed the quality of life for the average woman in China to increase dramatically over the past generation.

4. It rewarded compliance with needed goods and services. To encourage compliance with the one child policy, the Chinese government provided families with a certificate that rewarded them. Education subsidies, housing improvements, a longer leave period from their job, and interest-free loans were just some of the economic benefits that were awarded to families that complied with the policy.

5. It may have increased job opportunities and wages. With a generation of mostly only children entering the workforce, there would be more job opportunities and the chance for higher wages when compared to societies that did not have a one child policy in place. This could have helped to reduce the levels of extreme poverty that China experienced after World War II and lessened the food shortages that the country was experiencing.

The Cons of China’s One Child Policy

1. The results of the policy are questionable at best. Although China claims that 400 million births were prevented with their One Child Policy, other nations, such as Iran and Thailand, experienced similar per-capita declines in population without a similar policy in place. The reduction in births is more associated to economic growth than a restriction on family size.

2. It created a disparity in the childbirth ratio. In mainland China, the ratio of boys born compared to girls born reached a peak of 117: 100 after 1990, which is thought to be above the natural 111:100 ratio that can occur. That meant by 2020, there will be 30 million more men in Chinese society compared to women, which could lead to social instability. It may also be the cause of future emigration in the desire to find a mate.

3. It increased the costs of adoption. Parents who already had a child faced higher adoption costs because of China’s one child policy. This increased the number of children that were forced to live in state-run orphanages. In the 1980s, high mortality rates in some institutions caused some reforms to occur, but still separated children from their parents. Girls were disproportionally affected by this policy, with some families failing to even register their birth with the government for fear of losing their child.

4. It created care problems for adult children. Because only one child was allowed, it forced a care burden on the first generation of adult children in family groups. Commonly referred to as the “4-2-1 Problem,” it meant that one child had to care for their two parents and their four grandparents. This created a greater reliance on dependency programs and charitable works for a quality lifestyle to have their needs met. Since 2011, provinces allow couples to have two children if they are an only child to counter this issue.

5. The one child policy created a practice called “birth tourism.” To counter the problem of the one child policy, some families would travel to a foreign country or to Hong Kong for the birth of their second child. The US was a particularly popular travel destination as most children born in the United States have automatic US citizenship. Many Chinese families would travel to Saipan since it allowed Chinese visitors without a visa, creating birth tourism trips to maintain family structures.

6. It was unequally enforced. Numerous examples of unequal enforcement of the one child policy have been documented. Filmmaker Zhang Yimou had three children and was fined the equivalent of $1.2 million. In 2005, nearly 2,000 officials in one province violated the policy, but most did not face any penalties.

7. It suggests a violation of what many believe is a human right. Planning the size of one’s family is believed to be a basic human right. In a 1968 proclamation from the International Conference on Human Rights, it was decided that the number and spacing of children in a family is a basic right of the parents. To accommodate the policy, sterilizations were set and perhaps required, though evidence is limited. Even eugenics were promoted in the past within China as part of the one child policy.

The pros and cons of China’s one child policy are important to discuss, even though the policy has been phased out, because of its economic and societal impacts. Does the government have the right to dictate how big a family should be if that policy is supported by most of the population?

21 Advantages and Disadvantages of the One Child Policy

The one child policy was part of the birth planning program implemented by China in the 1970s to control the size of its national population. It was unique from other family planning policies around the world which focus on contraception, setting a legal limit on the size of a household in the country. This policy was implemented after a 10-year-long, two-child child policy that the Communist government enforced.

There were a variety of methods used to enforce this policy, including financial awards issued by the government. Beginning in 1982, China began rewarding families with an extra 5 yuan per month if they only had one child. Then the national government worked with local officials to conduct inspections, carry out registrations, and implement legal consequences for those who did not comply.

This policy created a number of unintended outcomes that the Chinese government is trying to manage today. It caused the nation’s fertility rates to plummet when compared to the rest of the world, even though the original implementation of it was as a temporary measure. There are several advantages and disadvantages of this policy to consider.

List of the Advantages of the One Child Policy

1. Families were not forced into abortions like some outside of China believe. There were voluntary abortions that occurred in China frequently because of the one child policy due to the desire for a boy instead of a girl. In this culture, the lineage and estate go through the male child, so many felt like their family line would terminate if they didn’t have a boy. That meant there was a significant increase in the number of voluntary abortions that occurred during this time, but it was not a mandatory policy of the government.

Even if you had more than one child, you were given contraception before having a tubal ligation as a woman. That meant you could still be intimate with your significant other while trying to stay within the concept of the law.

2. Multiple births were permitted under the one child policy. Parents in China were not forced to give one of their children up for adoption if they had twins. All multiple births were recognized as being part of the legal household without experiencing a penalty. Families might not have been eligible for a financial incentive to have just one child in this situation, but it was a way for many to experience the joys of a larger family like they wanted without being forced to pay significant fines for the privilege.

Couples that wanted more than one child found that the cost of the fertility medication that could increase their odds of having twins or triplets was significantly less than the fines they would pay for having two separate pregnancies.

3. The one child policy helped to transform the role that women play in Chinese society. Because families were authorized to have only one child as part of their family composition, the role of girls and women began to grow in China. Before the policy, men received a preponderance of the educational chances and career ventures from their family. Women were expected to take care of their residences and relationships unless exceptionally talented in some way.

After the implementation of the one child policy, families with one girl registered their children in school programs more often. They sought vocational learning possibilities not allowed by the unwritten practices of the past. This process allowed an entire generation of girls to enjoy a quality of life much greater than seen in the past – including the time before Communism.

4. There were financial benefits to consider for families under the one child policy. Even if you set aside the 5 yuan financial benefit for families that only had a single child in their household, this structure helped to create more economic stability at the local level. Parents could afford more educational and vocational opportunities because there was only one child to support. Schedules were easier to manage, care needs became simple to schedule, and there would still be friends to make in each community.

Critics of the policy suggest that kids growing up as an only child would be lonely, more anxious, bitter, and deal with a lot of repressed anger. Missing the unknown idea of having a brother or sister is also problematic. Is it better to provide more opportunities, or is it better to avoid potential emotional pitfalls?

5. There were additional benefits for only having one child that went beyond money. If you were granted a certificate which verified that you only had one child living with you, then there were several societal benefits awarded to your household. Some families received extra allowances of land for farming because of their compliance, which sometimes even included a free home. There were awards of free water for irrigation and consumption. Higher pensions, better government jobs, and priority services at the local hospital were sometimes included.

Students were even given extra points on their tests while in elementary school because of this unique socioeconomic policy.

6. The one child policy offered numerous exemptions that families could use. Although the public perception was that the one child policy applied to all families, that was not the case. If you lived in an area designated as being rural, then you could have at least two children in China – and sometimes more if you had significant agricultural work to do. Families from a designated ethnic minority could have up to three children during this period in Chinese history.

There were also several exceptions in place that would allow couples to have more children, including birth defects, physical or learning disabilities, or unexpected tragedies. If a family unit was composed of a mother and father who both came from an only child household, then the government had the discretion to permit a second child for them as well.

7. More jobs became available in China because of this policy. Because the one child policy in China prevented up to 400 million births, there are now more employment opportunities available for everyone in the country. Each person has less competition to fight through when trying to land a great job. If an only child applies for a position that someone from a multi-child household wants, then they’ll get the top priority for filling the spot.

Having a 117:100 ratio for men vs. women also means that families had a better opportunity to change their financial situation. Men were the primary income earners for much of the one child generation, which meant fewer food shortages, less poverty, and better educational options for the next generation.

List of the Disadvantages of the One Child Policy

1. It created mandatory contraception and sterilization policies. As part of the one child policy in China, women were required to have a contraceptive intrauterine device installed surgically after having their first child. This product offers a 99% success rate at preventing a pregnancy, so it was effective at controlling the population levels of the country. If a woman were to have a second child, then the government forced her to have a tubal ligation procedure.

Over 320 million Chinese women were fitted with intrauterine devices under this policy between 1980-2014. Another 108 women were forced to undergo sterilization with a tubal ligation. The men were much luckier, often being told to pay a fine for their activities instead.

2. This policy created a disparity in the gender ratio at birth in China. The gender ratio of newborn infants in mainland China reached 117 to 100 for boys vs. girls born, which was about 10% higher than the global baseline. It rose from 108:100 in 1981, which was the boundary of the natural baseline. That means there are 30 million more men than women in this generation of Chinese citizens, which could create significant socioeconomic issues for their country.

The reason for this disparity was a desire to have boys so that the family line could continue on. This option was not available for women at the time of this policy, and it is still incredibly rare for girls to have the same family rights as men with regards to inheritance.

3. There may be social issues because of the unusual gender ratio. China has already admitted that having between 32 million to 36 million more men than expected in their society could result in several social problems developing in the country over the years. There are tens of millions of young men who may be unable to find a future bride. The government is concerned that this may lead to higher levels of social unrest, sex trafficking, kidnapping, and other forms of criminal conduct so that intimacy can be an experience for them in some way.

4. It caused many parents to give up their children for adoption or abandon them. When parents had an unauthorized second birth or wanted a son, but had a daughter, then giving up the child for adoption became a financial strategy for them under the one child policy. Adoptions of daughters accounted for more than 50% of the “missing girls” that were not on census documents in the country. Starting in 1991, the Chinese government raised the penalties for additional children and levied them on those who even chose to adopt.

This action caused over 120,000 children who were abandoned to find hope in adoption with over 120,000 international parents.

5. This policy caused couples to seek fertility counseling when none was needed. One of the unique aspects of the one child policy was that it was more of a “one pregnancy policy” with its implementation. If a mother were to have a multiples birth, then they would not be penalized for the extra child or forced to give all but one up for adoption. Twins, triplets, and higher were allowed to stay with their parents. That means more families started using fertility medication as a way to have more kids legally. Between the start of this policy and 2006, the rate of multiple births doubled.

6. Families had little or no support left to them after death. When an only child has both of their parents pass away at any age, it changes their concept of family. There was no longer the possibility of being able to manage many of the social needs of this society because of tragic incidents that occurred. It was not unusual for parents to become over-protective of their children to prevent loss, including a reduction in extra-curricular or after-school activities so that they wouldn’t need to apply to the government to receive an exception to have another child.

7. The cost of adoptions in China rose because of the one child policy. Because parents were no longer allowed to adopt children if they had one of their own under these guidelines, state-run orphanages began to pop up around the country to support the increasing numbers of unwanted children. Even when there was family nearby to care for the child, the imposition of financial penalties made it all but impossible for everyone to stay together. It was not unusual for over 90% of the population of these facilities to be girls because of the emphasis to have boys in the culture.

China recognized the gender discrepancies that were forming in their society, so they worked hard to make it more challenging for girls to leave through international adoption. Unless you were wealthy, it was impossible to finalize the legal processes in the later years of the one child policy unless you agreed to live there.

8. It created care burdens for aging parents that some children are still trying to manage. This disadvantage is the primary reason why China eventually moved back to a two-child policy. When there was only one child in a household, the financial burden of taking care of aging parents made it a challenge to improve the standard of living at almost every level of society. Many families found themselves forced to live with both sets of grandparents, becoming 3- and 4-generation households as a way to share the burden of the issue.

Even with this shift in emphasis, charitable requests continued to rise over the life of the one child policy in China. There was an increase in the number of dependency applications the government processed as well. It was such a problem in some regions that families who could prove this hardship were often given permission to have extra kids.

9. The Chinese government enforced the one child policy inconsistently. There were over 2,000 government officials in one province that violated the one child policy without any formal punishment. Then there were people like Zhang Yimou, who received a fine of more than $1 million for the number of children that he had with various women. Some rural districts were implementing financial penalties that equaled six times the annual salary of the household if it was discovered there was an extra child present, yet it didn’t levy this punishment on anyone in a government job in some instances.

This disadvantage led to high levels of resistance throughout Chinese culture. Calls for reform were briefly quashed until the scientific research regarding this policy showed that there were several future problems that might occur if it were allowed to continue.

10. Chinese nationals would leave the country to have children. Some families attempted to travel to Hong Kong as a way to avoid the potential penalty of having more than one child. Women in China were paying over $50,000 to have another child in the United States to avoid the problems with this policy. Any location that granted immediate citizenship to a child born in the country, especially the U.S., would provide a favorable status for the family back in China. That mean the risks of receiving a devastating consequence were severely minimized if the efforts were successful.

11. Families were forced to register their children to aunts and uncles. Because the government would issue fines that were 2-6 times the amount of a person’s annual salary as a social services fee for an additional child, some parents went to great lengths to protect their children and avoid potential legal consequences. If there was a sibling living overseas, then the family could assign that child to the individual, knowing that they weren’t planning on returning to China.

Although it seems like an advantage since the child could stay in the home, it limited the traveling opportunities for families. If the assigned sibling did return home, then the government would assign the child to them – creating the potential of an indefinite separation.

12. The one child policy targeted the urban poor more than anyone. Most of the wealthy families in China would simply pay the fine for having more than one child, and then they would move on with their lives. This disadvantage was especially prevalent in cities like Shanghai or Beijing. If you weren’t in the middle class, then there were numerous risks that you faced.

If you were unable to pay the fine for an additional child, then you could have your property seized. There were other actions, including jail time, that were possible in extreme circumstances. That’s why families either hid their additional child or decided to abandon them.

13. It violates UN policies on reproductive rights. It is true that the government has a say in the social planning needs of their nation. There is also a need for these representatives to protect the rights that we feel are fundamental to the human experience. Since 1968, the United Nations has declared that family planning and reproductive rights, including how many children to have, should be part of each household’s decision-making process.

Instead of looking at ways to encourage parents to be responsible with their family planning needs, the Chinese government forced the process on would-be parents. By not allowing parents to make the best possible decision for their household, China could arguably be in violation of this agreement.

14. It created a financial burden for the government. In some parts of China, up to 4% of the GDP was being spent each year on enforcement policies and procedures for the one child policy. Even when families were caught and paying their required fines, the 4 billion yuan spent annually was never fully recouped in any situation. This disadvantage may be why there was such a disparity in the enforcement of the policy. By creating financial burdens to the government, Chinese interests would always have access to cheap labor for those who chose to violate the policy.

Verdict on the Advantages and Disadvantages of the One Child Policy

China eventually gave up on the one child policy because of the many disadvantages that they faced with its implementation. Starting in January 2016, the nation is now using a universal two-child policy that applies to each household. Even though 76% of Chinese nationals said that they supported the concept of government-based family planning, the use of forced sterilization, contraception, and abortions to ensure compliance was highly controversial in the rest of the world.

More than 50% of households in China from 1979-2015 qualified to have a second child because of their status, including being part of an ethnic minority.

The advantages and disadvantages of the one child policy may have prevented hundreds of millions of births that could have caused problems for the Chinese economy, but there are lessons to be learned from this process as well. Instead of forcing people into situations where a birth rate reduction becomes necessary, education and awareness can produce similar results.

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Open Access

Peer-reviewed

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

Stuart Gietel-Basten,
Xuehui Han,

Published: November 6, 2019
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0220170
Reader Comments

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

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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https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0220170.t001

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.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0220170.g001

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 ).

(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.

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.

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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Quantity-Quality and the One Child Policy:The Only-Child Disadvantage in School Enrollment in Rural China

Many believe that increasing the quantity of children will lead to a decrease in their quality. This paper exploits plausibly exogenous changes in family size caused by relaxations in China's One Child Policy to estimate the causal effect of family size on school enrollment of the first child. The results show that for one-child families, an additional child significantly increased school enrollment of first-born children by approximately 16 percentage-points. The effect is larger for households where the children are of the same sex.

I thank Joshua Angrist, Daron Acemoglu, Abhijit Banerjee, Gary Becker, Esther Duflo, Oded Galor, Andrew Foster, Ashley Lester, Mark Rosenzweig and David Weil for their many insights; and participants at the MIT development lunch, BREAD and the Econometrics Society for useful comments. I am incredibly grateful to the China Health and Nutritional Survey at the University of North Carolina and the National Bureau of Statistics of China for sharing their data with me. All mistakes are my own. The views expressed herein are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

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Asia Pacific Curriculum - China's One-Child Policy
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The one-child policy was a program in China that limited most Chinese families to one child each. It was implemented nationwide by the Chinese government in 1980, and it ended in 2016. The policy was enacted to address the growth rate of the country’s population , which the government viewed as being too rapid. It was enforced by a variety of methods, including financial incentives for families in compliance, contraceptives , forced sterilizations , and forced abortions .

September 25, 1980, is often cited as the official start of China ’s one-child policy, although attempts to curb the number of children in a family existed prior to that. Birth control and family planning had been promoted from 1949. A voluntary program introduced in 1978 encouraged families to have only one or two children. In 1979 there was a push for families to limit themselves to one child, but that was not evenly enforced across China. The Chinese government issued a letter on September 25, 1980, that called for nationwide adherence to the one-child policy.

China ’s one-child policy was controversial because it was a radical intervention by government in the reproductive lives of citizens, because of how it was enforced, and because of some of its consequences. Although some of the government’s enforcement methods were comparatively mild, such as providing contraceptives , millions of Chinese had to endure methods such as forced sterilizations and forced abortions . Long-term consequences of the policy included a substantially greater number of males than females in China and a shrinking workforce.

When did the one-child policy end?

The end of China ’s one-child policy was announced in late 2015, and it formally ended in 2016. Beginning in 2016, the Chinese government allowed all families to have two children, and in 2021 all married couples were permitted to have as many as three children.

There have been many consequences to China’s one-child policy. The country’s fertility rate and birth rate both decreased after 1980; the Chinese government estimated that some 400 million births had been prevented. Because sons were generally favoured over daughters, the sex ratio in China became skewed toward men, and there was a rise in the number of abortions of female fetuses along with an increase in the number of female babies killed or placed in orphanages.

After the one-child policy ended in 2016, China’s birth and fertility rates remained low, leaving the country with a population that was aging rapidly and a workforce that was shrinking. With data from China’s 2020 census highlighting an impending demographic and economic crisis, the Chinese government announced in 2021 that married couples would be allowed to have as many as three children.

one-child policy , official program initiated in the late 1970s and early ’80s by the central government of China , the purpose of which was to limit the great majority of family units in the country to one child each. The rationale for implementing the policy was to reduce the growth rate of China’s enormous population . It was announced in late 2015 that the program was to end in early 2016.

China began promoting the use of birth control and family planning with the establishment of the People’s Republic in 1949, though such efforts remained sporadic and voluntary until after the death of Mao Zedong in 1976. By the late 1970s China’s population was rapidly approaching the one-billion mark, and the country’s new pragmatic leadership headed by Deng Xiaoping was beginning to give serious consideration to curbing what had become a rapid population growth rate. A voluntary program was announced in late 1978 that encouraged families to have no more than two children, one child being preferable. In 1979 demand grew for making the limit one child per family. However, that stricter requirement was then applied unevenly across the country among the provinces, and by 1980 the central government sought to standardize the one-child policy nationwide. 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.

The program was intended to be applied universally, although exceptions were made—e.g., parents within some ethnic minority groups or those whose firstborn was handicapped were allowed to have more than one child. It was implemented more effectively in urban environments , where much of the population consisted of small nuclear families who were more willing to comply with the policy, than in rural areas, with their traditional agrarian extended families that resisted the one-child restriction. In addition, enforcement of the policy was somewhat uneven over time, generally being strongest in cities and more lenient in the countryside. Methods of enforcement included making various contraceptive methods widely available, offering financial incentives and preferential employment opportunities for those who complied, imposing sanctions (economic or otherwise) against those who violated the policy, and, at times (notably the early 1980s), invoking stronger measures such as forced abortions and sterilizations (the latter primarily of women).

The result of the policy was a general reduction in China’s fertility and birth rates after 1980, with the fertility rate declining and dropping below two children per woman in the mid-1990s. Those gains were offset to some degree by a similar drop in the death rate and a rise in life expectancy , but China’s overall rate of natural increase declined.

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What Was China's One-Child Policy?
Understanding the One-Child Policy

Enforcement of the Policy

Implications of the Policy

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What Was China's One-Child Policy? Its Implications and Importance

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What Was China's One-Child Policy?

Introduced by the Chinese government in 1979 and formally ending in 2016, the one-child policy was a method of controlling the population. The policy mandated that the vast majority of couples in the country could have only one child. The phrase “one-child policy” was used often outside China but it can be a bit misleading. The rule didn't apply to all. Exceptions were frequently made and local officials had discretion over how population limits were achieved.

These collective efforts were nevertheless intended to alleviate the social, economic, and environmental problems associated with the country's rapidly growing population. The rule was phased out beginning in 2015.

Key Takeaways

The Chinese government imposed its one-child policy in 1979 as a method of controlling the population.
The one-child policy prevented about 400 million births in China according to estimates.
The policy was enforced through a mix of incentives and sanctions.
It was introduced in 1979 and discontinued in 2015, formally ending in 2016.
The one-child policy had important consequences for China's demographics.

Understanding China's One-Child Policy

The one-child policy refers to a set of laws implemented in China beginning in 1979 in response to explosive population growth that government officials feared would lead to a demographic disaster. China has a long history of encouraging birth control and family planning. The government began promoting birth control in the 1950s when population growth started to outpace the food supply.

China’s population was quickly approaching one billion by the late 1970s, however, and the Chinese government considered ways to curb population growth. This effort began in 1979 with mixed results but was implemented more seriously and uniformly in 1980 when the government standardized the practice nationwide.

There were exceptions, however, including ethnic minorities, for those whose firstborn was labeled as disabled, and for rural families whose firstborn was not a boy.

The policy was most effective in urban areas because those in China’s agrarian communities resisted it to a greater extent.

The one-child policy was initially meant to be a temporary measure but it may have prevented up to 400 million births in the end. China ultimately ended its one-child policy after it became apparent that it might have been too effective. Many Chinese were heading into retirement and the nation’s population had too few young people to provide for the older population’s retirement and healthcare while sustaining continued economic growth .

The Chinese government announced on Oct. 29, 2015 that the mandated policy was ended. Its rules were slowly relaxed to allow more couples fitting certain criteria to have a second child. All couples are permitted to have two children as of 2024.

Several methods of enforcement were used, including incentives and sanctions that varied across China. There were financial incentives and preferential employment opportunities for those who complied. Those who violated the policy faced economic and other sanctions. The government employed more draconian measures at times, including forced abortions and sterilization.

The one-child policy was officially discontinued in 2015. The efficacy of the policy itself has been challenged, however, because population growth generally slows as societies gain in income as happened in China during this time. The death rate declined, too, as the birth rate declined in China and life expectancy increased.

One-Child Policy Implications

The one-child policy had serious implications for China's demographic and economic future. China's fertility rate stands at 1.6 in the early 2020s and it's among the lowest in the world. The U.S. is at 1.7.

China has a considerable gender skew in the 2020s. Its population includes roughly 3% to 4% more males than females. China had a rise in the abortion of female fetuses, the number of baby girls left in orphanages, and even infanticides of baby girls with the implementation of the one-child policy and the preference for male children.

This continues to affect marriage and birth rates around the country with fewer women of childbearing age in China. The drop in birth rates meant fewer children, which occurred as death rates dropped and longevity rates rose. It's estimated that the share of adults ages 65 and older will have risen from just 12% to a projected 26% by 2050.

Older parents will be relying on their children to support them and they'll have fewer children to do so. This is compounded by the massive urbanization of China since 1980 with those living in urban areas increasing from 19% in 1980 to 60% in the 2020s. China is also facing a potential labor shortage and will have trouble supporting this aging population through its state services.

The policy led to the proliferation of undocumented, non-first-born children. Their undocumented status makes it impossible for them to legally leave China. They can't register for a passport and they have no access to public education. Their parents were fined or removed from their jobs.

Does China Still Have the One-Child Policy?

No. China reverted to a two-child policy after its one-child policy was terminated in 2015 and its restrictions were gradually loosened before it officially ended in 2016.

Did China's One-Child Policy Increase Its Economic Growth?

China's one-child policy could have contributed to economic gains by initially reducing population growth and creating a larger working-age population relative to children. This would have boosted productivity and savings.

Countries with increases in national wealth tend to have population growth that slows down, however. The increase in economic growth in China may have helped reduce the number of Chinese newborns over this time, not the other way around.

The long-term effects of these demographic shifts that occurred from about 1979 to 2015 include a shrinking labor force and a greater proportion of the population that's retired. This posed challenges for continued economic growth and the social safety net.

Is China Now Encouraging the Birth Rate?

Yes. China has implemented or increased parental tax deductions, family leave, housing subsidies for families, and spending on reproductive health and childcare services to increase the national birth rate since ending the policy. The Chinese government also promotes flexible work hours and work-from-home options for parents.

Most interesting are policies one wouldn't consider to be related to the birth rate at first glance. They include banning private tutoring companies from profiting off teaching core subjects during weekends or holidays. China is attempting to reduce the burdens of parenting by lowering educational pressure on children and this often costly financial load on parents.

Parents may feel better able to handle additional children when they have greater financial security. Families can spend more time together, fostering greater family connections by reducing pressure academically, especially on weekends and holidays.

What Happened If You Broke the One-Child Policy?

Violators of China's one-child policy could be fined, forced to have abortions or sterilizations or lose their jobs.

China's one-child policy was implemented as a method of controlling the population. It was a set of laws related to population growth that were implemented in 1979, representing one of the more draconian modern attempts to intervene in a country's rising demographics.

The Chinese population did slow but the policy also resulted in unintended consequences such as an aging population , gender imbalance, and a shrinking workforce. Its discontinuation in 2015 and subsequent measures to encourage higher birth rates reflect China's complex challenges in balancing population control with sustainable economic and social development.

Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada. " China’s One Child Policy ." Page 1.

National Library of Medicine. " The Effects of China’s Universal Two-Child Policy ."

Library of Congress. " China’s One Child Policy. "

Howden, David and Zhou, Yang. “ China’s One-Child Policy: Some Unintended Consequences .” Economic Affairs, 34/3, pp. 353-69.

The New York Times. " China Ends One-Child Policy, Allowing Families Two Children ."

Wasserstrom, J.N. "China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know." Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018, pp. 81-84.

The World Bank. " Fertility Rate, Total (Births per Woman) - China ."

Pew Research Center. " Without One-child Policy, China Still Might Not See Baby Boom, Gender Balance ."

Gao, Fang and Li, Xia. " From One to Three: China’s Motherhood Dilemma and Obstacle to Gender Equality ." Women, 2021, pp. 252-266.

Population Reference Bureau. " Aging and Health in China: What Can We Learn From the World’s Largest Population of Older People? "

United Nations. " Revision of World Urbanization Prospects ."

World Health Organization. " Ageing and Health in China ."

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v.314(7095); 1997 Jun 7

The one child family policy: the good, the bad, and the ugly.

Rapid population growth in China during the 1950s and '60s led to the "late, long, few" policy of the 1970s and a dramatic reduction in the total fertility rate. However, population growth remained too high for the economic targets of Deng Xiao Ping's reforms, so the one child family policy was introduced in 1979 and has remained in force ever since. The strategy is different in urban and rural areas, and implementation varies from place to place depending on local conditions. The policy has been beneficial in terms of curbing population growth, aiding economic growth, and improving the health and welfare of women and children. On the negative side there are concerns about demographic and sex imbalance and the psychological effects for a generation of only children in the cities. The atrocities often associated with the policy, such as female infanticide, occur rarely now. China may relax the policy in the near future, probably allowing two children for everyone.

The Full Text of this article is available as a PDF (277K).

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China's "one-child" policy has been relaxed, and now married couples may have two children. But according to scholars, the damage is already done. The icon indicates free access to the linked research on JSTOR. China's infamous "one-child policy" came to an end in 2016, when family limits in the nation were raised to two children.
Challenging Myths About China's One-Child Policy
Abstract China's controversial one-child policy continues to generate controversy and misinformation. This essay challenges several common myths: that Mao Zedong consistently opposed efforts to limit China's population growth; that consequently China's population continued to grow rapidly until after his death; that the launching of the one-child policy in 1980 led to a dramatic decline ...
How does the one child policy impact social and economic outcomes?
The 20th century witnessed the birth of modern family planning and its effects on the fertility of hundreds of millions of couples around the world. In 1979, China formally initiated one of the world's strictest family planning programs—the "one child policy.". Despite its obvious significance, the policy has been significantly ...
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A tightening of the one-child policy in terms of one interquartile range decrease of the excess fertility rate residual can increase the rural migration rate by 0.823 percentage points in 2000 (that is, 0.0295 × 0.279). There has been little study of the effect of the one-child policy on these outcomes in China.
Consequences of China's one-child policy
One-child policy - Population Control, Gender Imbalance, Social Impact: The one-child policy produced consequences beyond the goal of reducing population growth. Most notably, the country's overall sex ratio became skewed toward males—roughly between 3 and 4 percent more males than females. Traditionally, male children (especially firstborn) have been preferred—particularly in rural ...
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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-rearing in the People's Republic of China and in the Chinese diaspora.
PDF Challenging Myths About China's One-Child Policy
In 1979, immediately prior to the formal announcement of the one-child policy, there was another push for birth-control medical operations. Nationwide, the number of birth-control operations rose nearly 50 per cent in one year, from 21.72 million in 1978 to 30.58 million in 1979.
China's demographic challenges: the long-term consequences of the one
June 30, 2021. ESSAY / Rut Noboa. The Chinese one-child policy is the largest and most infamous family planning policy carried out in recent history. Developed within the wider context of family planning and economic development in China, the policy played an important role in achieving a massive decline in fertility in recent years. However ...
PDF How does the one child policy impact social and economic outcomes?
One child policy fertility fine rate by Chinese province. Source: [1]. ELEVATOR PITCH. The 20th century witnessed the birth of modern family planning and its effects on the fertility of hundreds of . millions of couples around the world. In 1979, China formally initiated one of the world's strictest family planning programs—the "one child ...
China's One Child Policy
The backdrop for China's unprecedented effort to enforce a one-child policy after 1980 is a strong set of family and child-rearing traditions stretching back millennia as well as debates about that country's population dynamics and trends over the centuries. Baker 1979 presents a good summary of the literature on patterns of Chinese family ...
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Aside from the obvious economic costs of having more dependents and fewer workers in the population, the policy places a huge burden on single Chinese children at the bottom of the resulting "4 ...
The Social and Sociological Consequences of China's One-Child Policy
China's one-child policy is one of the largest and most controversial social engineering projects in human history. With the extreme restrictions it imposed on reproduction, the policy has altered China's demographic and social fabric in numerous fundamental ways in its nearly four decades (1979-2015) of existence. Its ramifications reach far beyond China's national borders ...
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The Pros of China's One Child Policy. 1. It was supported within the country. Countries should have the ability to dictate their own course of societal growth, even if other nations don't always agree with the policies that are in place. 76% of the population in China supported the One Child Policy in surveys taken in 2006.
PDF Quantity-Quality and the One Child Policy:The Only-Child Disadvantage
The results show that for one-child families, an additional child significantly increased school enrollment of first-born children by approximately 16 percentage-points. The effect is larger for households where the children are of the same sex. Nancy Qian Department of Economics Brown University 64 Waterman Street Providence, RI 02912 and NBER ...
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The one child policy was part of the birth planning program implemented by China in the 1970s to control the size of its national population. It was unique from other family planning policies around the world which focus on contraception, setting a legal limit on the size of a household in the country. This policy was implemented after a 10-year-long, two-child child policy that the Communist ...
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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.
Quantity-Quality and the One Child Policy:The Only-Child Disadvantage
This paper exploits plausibly exogenous changes in family size caused by relaxations in China's One Child Policy to estimate the causal effect of family size on school enrollment of the first child. The results show that for one-child families, an additional child significantly increased school enrollment of first-born children by approximately ...
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Croll, et al. 1985 is a collection of essays by leading China scholars examining the transition from the "later, longer, fewer" campaign to the one-child policy and how the latter campaign was being implemented in its very early stages. Bongaarts, John, and Susan Greenhalgh.
One-child policy
one-child policy, official program initiated in the late 1970s and early '80s by the central government of China, the purpose of which was to limit the great majority of family units in the country to one child each. The rationale for implementing the policy was to reduce the growth rate of China's enormous population.It was announced in late 2015 that the program was to end in early 2016.
What Was China's One-Child Policy? Its Implications and Importance
Introduced by the Chinese government in 1979 and formally ending in 2016, the one-child policy was a method of controlling the population. The policy mandated that the vast majority of couples in ...
One-child policy
A propaganda painting in Guangdong promotes the idea of a nuclear family with a single child. The text reads "Planned child birth is everyone's responsibility." Birth rate in China, 1950-2015. The one-child policy (Chinese: 一孩政策; pinyin: yī hái zhèngcè) was a population planning initiative in China implemented between 1979 and 2015 to curb the country's population growth by ...
The one child family policy: the good, the bad, and the ugly
Abstract. Rapid population growth in China during the 1950s and '60s led to the "late, long, few" policy of the 1970s and a dramatic reduction in the total fertility rate. However, population growth remained too high for the economic targets of Deng Xiao Ping's reforms, so the one child family policy was introduced in 1979 and has remained in ...