Has China outgrown its one-child policy?

Contributed by Ying Jiang
Source: Science (DOI: 10.1126/science.329.5998.1458)

This article discusses a brief history and the known harms of the one-child policy. Following the Cultural Revolution baby-boom era, birth control and planning was introduced and then made strictly one-child in the 80s. Known economic and human rights infringement issues include aging population, diminishing workforce, sex-selective abortions and outrageous fines on offenders.

The author then reports efforts that attempt to gather evidence for a need to lift the one-child policy (where a chief obstacle has been bureaucratic inertia of the family-planning official organizations). The question whether China has outgrown the one-child policy was approached by testing the hypothesis of whether China's fertility rate has fallen so low anyway, that a compulsory policy is no longer needed.

Through demographic surveys and analysis, the answer is pretty much a yes. The decline in average fertility rate is tied with trends in modernized and urbanized states, and is linked to high costs of education. In fact, in one of the interviews, the percentage of women eligible for a second child who intend to have that second child was a minority of 45%. The actual percentage of women who followed through with their intentions, as studies years later reported, was even lower. Therefore scholars have concluded that lifting the one-child policy is reasonable. With these studies made known to the officials, one can start to hope for a slow process of transitioning.