One Child Policy

Flora Lau
11/14/19

One Child Policy

              The official definition of the one child policy is 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 one child policy was created by Deng Xiaoping and was implemented in 1979 and by 1980 the central government sought to standardize the one-child policy nationwide. On September 25, 1980, the government called upon all to adhere to the one-child policy. The program was enforced by the government by only allowing families to only have one child each and if they complied then they would get incentives like money and preferential employment opportunities. If they didn't, most women had abortions. Some exceptions such as for minority peoples or for those whose firstborn was handicapped, those measures included allowing rural families in some areas to have two or even three children and permitting parents whose firstborn was a girl or who both were only children to have a second child.

One consequence is that the country’s overall sex ratio became skewed toward males, roughly between 3 and 4 percent more males than females because traditionally, male children have been preferred as sons to inherit the family name and property and are responsible for the care of elderly parents.This resulted to having a girl becoming highly undesirable, resulting in a rise in abortions of female fetuses which increases in the number of female children who were placed in orphanages or were abandoned, and even infanticide of baby girl. Another consequence of the policy was a growing proportion of elderly people, the result of the concurrent drop in children born and rise in longevity since 1980. That became a concern, as the great majority of senior citizens in China relied on their children for support after they retired, and there were fewer children to support them. A third consequence was instances in which the births of subsequent children after the first went unreported or were hidden from authorities. Those children, most of whom were undocumented, faced hardships in obtaining education and employment. Although the number of such children is not known, estimates have ranged from the hundreds of thousands to several million.