t t
e China Journal, no. 74. 1324-9347/2015/7401-0008. Copyright 2015 by e Australian National University. All rights reserved.
Challenging Myths About China’s
One-Child Policy
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China’s controversial one-child policy continues to generate controversy and misinforma-
tion. is essay challenges several common myths: that Mao Zedong consistently opposed
eorts to limit China’s population growth; that consequently China’s population continued
to grow rapidly until aer his death; that the launching of the one-child policy in 1980 led
to a dramatic decline in China’s fertility rate; and that the imposition of the policy prevented
400 million births. Evidence is presented contradicting each of these claims. Mao Zedong at
times forcefully advocated strict limits on births and presided over a major switch to coer-
cive birth planning aer 1970; as much as three-quarters of the decline in fertility since 1970
occurred before the launching of the one-child policy; fertility levels uctuated in China
aer the policy was launched; and most of the further decline in fertility since 1980 can be
attributed to economic development, not coercive enforcement of birth limits.
I
n 2013, with the merger of the National Population and Birth Planning
1
Commission and the Ministry of Health to form a new National Health and
Population Planning Commission in March and the announcement of a partial
relaxation of the one-child policy in November, China embarked on a journey
that may eventually end the most extreme and controversial policy of birth con-
trol in human history.
2
In the last three decades and more, numerous studies
have been devoted to examining the policy’s origin, enforcement and eects. Yet
1. e Chinese term jihua shengyu is usually translated as “family planning” in Chinese government
publications, including when referring to the names of government agencies responsible for this task.
However, since the term “family planning” is understood outside China to refer to a variety of practices
that help families to meet their own childbearing goals, while the Chinese practices involved are decidedly
dierent—state interventions to limit the numbers of births—we will throughout instead use the terms
“birth planning” or “birth limits”.
2. e partial relaxation involves couples where one spouse is an only child and the other spouse has
siblings. Such couples are now allowed to have two children. (Couples where both spouses are single
children have been allowed to have two children since the policy was launched in 1980.) While the symbolic
importance of this relaxation may be important, the actual demographic eect is likely to be quite minor.
See Martin King Whyte, “Modifying China’s One-Child Policy”, published online in E-International
Relations (2 February 2014), http://www.e-ir.info/2014/02/02/modifying-chinas-one-child-policy/, accessed 2
February 2015. At the time of writing, the one-child policy remains very much in eect, although we
note long-standing exceptions to the one-child limit later in this article.
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confusion and myths remain, not only among the public but also in scholarly
publications.
One example is an article published in this journal. Issue No. 72 of e China
Journal contains a very interesting analysis by Yan Wei and Li Zhang of the record
of Yicheng, Shanxi, in implementing a two-child rather than a one-child policy
since 1980.
3
Although the details on how Yicheng carried out a two-child policy
are fascinating and we are in substantial agreement with their conclusions about
the Yicheng experience, the authors set the context for their analysis with state-
ments about the origins of mandatory birth limits that are incorrect. For exam-
ple, in describing the situation in the 1970s, they state: “the state never extended
its birth-limitation eorts to rural areas and set no numerical demographic tar-
gets at the national level until the late 1970s” (p. 102). eir contention that the
switch from voluntary to coercively enforced birth planning only occurred aer
1980 is contradicted by a large amount of prior research.
4
Nor is this example from the article about Yicheng County an isolated instance
of mistaken generalizations about the historical record. In his otherwise mas-
terful account of Deng Xiaoping’s role in transforming China aer the death of
Mao Zedong, Ezra Vogel deals only very briey with the origins of the one-child
policy, but when he does he also gets the facts wrong: “When Mao was alive, de-
spite some educational programs and the supplying of birth control devices, birth
control made little headway”.
5
Erroneous statements such as these are quite common. ere is a need to set
the record straight regarding a series of myths about the origins and record of
China’s coercive birth planning regime. Even though an accurate picture is al-
ready available from prior research and publications, key features of that record
have too oen been ignored or forgotten. We use this opportunity to challenge a
series of such myths, and not just the specic erroneous claims cited above.
Common myths about the origins and record of China’s policy include the
following:
3. Yan Wei and Li Zhang, “Re-Examination of the Yicheng Two-Child Program”, e China Journal, No. 72
(July 2014), pp. 98–120.
4. See in particular, Susan Greenhalgh, Just One Child: Science and Policy in Deng’s China (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2008); Wang Feng, Yong Cai and Baochang Gu, “Population, Policy, and
Politics: How Will History Judge China’s One-Child Policy?”, Population and Development Review, Vol. 38
(2013 [supplement]), pp. 115–29. See also Tyrene White, China’s Longest Campaign: Birth Planning in the
People’s Republic, 1949–2005 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006); omas Scharping, Birth Control in
China 1949–2000: Population Policy and Demographic Development (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003);
Susan Greenhalgh and Edwin Winckler, Governing China’s Population: From Leninist to Neoliberal Biopolitics
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005).
5. Ezra Vogel, Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press,
2011), pp. 434–35.
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1. Mao Zedong was and remained an ardent pro-natalist until the end. Despite
some periods in which he allowed voluntary birth planning eorts, it was only
possible to switch to a much more concerted national eort to enforce fertility
limits aer his death.
2. Due to the obstruction that Mao’s stance on population issues created, China’s
population continued to grow at a rapid and uncontrolled rate until aer his
death, necessitating the contemplation of a more drastic and coercive program,
the mandatory policy enforced aer 1980.
3. Once the transition from voluntary birth planning campaigns to the highly co-
ercive one-child policy was launched in 1980, Chinese fertility rates began a
sharp descent, eventually reaching sub-replacement levels of fertility (below a
total fertility rate of 2.1 births per woman
6
) by about 1990 and in the years that
followed.
4. However coercive and objectionable the one-child policy may be, the campaign
led to the prevention of at least 400 million births. China today and perhaps
the world in general are better o in multiple ways as a result of that success in
controlling population size.
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Each of these generalizations is at least highly misleading, and in many particu-
lars completely wrong. We start with Mao’s pro-natalist record. It is certainly true
that Mao is on record on several occasions as stating that population growth
was not a problem in a socialist country like China, but such statements were
more philosophical and ideological than practical. Mao made his best-known
statement on this subject shortly before the founding of the People’s Republic, in
September 1949. In a rebuttal of statements by Dean Acheson, US Secretary of
State under President Truman, who considered overpopulation a main source of
China’s revolution, Mao proclaimed:
It is a very good thing that China has a big population. Even if China’s population
multiplies many times, she is fully capable of nding a solution; the solution is
production. e absurd argument of Western bourgeois economists like Malthus
that increases in food cannot keep pace with increases in population was not only
thoroughly refuted in theory by Marxists long ago, but has also been completely
6. e total fertility rate (TFR) is not a statistic, but a projection or estimate of how many babies the
average woman would give birth to in her lifetime if current fertility rates (of women of all ages, marital
statuses and parity levels) were to continue indenitely at the same levels.
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exploded by the realities in the Soviet Union and the Liberated Areas of China aer
their revolutions.
7
However, such rhetoric does not mean that Mao favored promoting population
growth or that he consistently opposed eorts to reduce China’s birth rate.
Mao’s approach to population issues aer 1949 was more practical than ideo-
logical. By the mid-1950s, confronted with the challenges of managing the coun-
try and feeding its population, Mao and other leaders began to sing a dierent
tune. At the Eighth Congress of the Chinese Communist Party in 1956, Premier
Zhou Enlai gave a speech in which he twice mentioned the need to advocate birth
control. Early the following year, in the original version of his famous speech
of 27 February 1957, “On the Correct Handling of Contradictions among the
People”, Mao Zedong conveyed the same idea in much more detailed terms:
Our country has so many people, which no country in the world can compare
with. It would be better to have fewer births. (Re)production needs to be planned.
In my view, humankind is completely incapable of managing itself. It has plans for
production in factories, for producing cloth, tables and chairs, and steel, but there
is no plan for producing humans. is is anarchism—no governing, no organiza-
tion and no rules. is government perhaps needs to have a special ministry—what
about a ministry of birth control? Or perhaps establishing a commission, as part of
the government?
8
By late 1957, the urgency which Mao attached to birth control had increased.
In his speech concluding the Enlarged ird Plenary Session of the Eighth Cen-
tralCommittee of the Chinese Communist Party, delivered on 9 October 1957,
Mao remarked:
Of course birth control is still necessary, and I am not for encouraging more births.
ere should be a ten-year program for promoting birth control: three years for
pilot programs and publicity, three years for promotion and expansion, and four
years for universal implementation. It would be too late to wait until our popula-
tion size reaches 800 million. While we don’t promote birth control in ethnic mi-
nority areas, nor in sparsely populated mountainous areas, we still need to have the
idea debated and heard. I think birth control should be part of the middle school
7. “e Bankruptcy of the Idealist Conception of History” (16 September 1949), in Selected Works of Mao
Tse-tung, Vol. IV (Peking: Foreign Language Press, 1961), p. 453.
8. Mao Zedong zhuzuo zhuanti zhaibian (Excerpts from Works of Mao Zedong by Topic) (Beijing: Central
Document Publishing House, 2003), p. 970 (translation our own). is passage, along with several others
unrelated to population issues, was deleted from subsequent published versions of Mao’s 1957 speech.
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curriculum. It’s not OK to have human reproduction in a state of total anarchy—we
need birth planning.
9
It is true that by the following year, believing that socialism and the Great
Leap Forward would solve China’s food security problems, Mao became less wor-
ried about population growth, but he still believed in the ultimate desirability of
birth control, albeit not in the short term. For example, on 28 May 1958, he said,
“We are not afraid of a population of 800 million or one billion. American report-
ers say that aer 100 years, the Chinese population will constitute 50 per cent
of the world population. By that time, our cultural level will be high. When all
the people are college educated, they will naturally practice birth control.”
10
On
17 August 1958, in a Politburo meeting, he made another comment on popula-
tion: “We need to change our thinking about population. I have said to control it
within 800 million, but I now see that it would not be a problem to go over 1 bil-
lion. ere is no need to advocate for more births. Fertility control goes together
with improvement in education.”
11
However, even before the end of the massive famine caused by the Great Leap
Forward, Mao had reverted to expressing more concern about the need to limit
births. In his conversation with General Montgomery on 27 May 1960, Mao
said that the population in China would grow by 100 million, not 150 million as
suggested by Montgomery: “We are working to control our population growth”.
Several years later, in a conversation with the Minister of Health on 20 August
1965, Mao made two comments related to birth control. “Tianjin provided birth
control for free. While it looked like an economic loss to the state on the surface,
the real eect is just the opposite . . . You need to include birth control when you
launch rural health programs.”
12
In talking with the American journalist Edgar
Snow in 1965 and again in 1971, Mao Zedong complained that too few in rural
China were using contraceptives.
13
Finally, while not much is available in ocial documents on Mao’s thinking
on population matters during the 1960s and 1970s, from the record it is clear
that Mao returned to the assessment of China’s need for birth control that he had
made in 1957. China’s Birth Planning Commission within the State Council was
established in 1964 to lead birth-control eorts, shortly aer China’s population
growth recovered from the devastating Great Leap Forward famine, and exactly
9. Mao Zedong wenji (Works of Mao Zedong), Vol. 7 (Beijing: People’s Press, 1999), p. 308.
10. Quoted in a Cultural Revolution Red Guard document collection, Mao Zedong sixiang wansui (Long
Live Mao Zedong ought), Vol. 3 (Wuhan: n.p., 1968), p. 86.
11. Mao Zedong sixiang wansui, p. 101.
12. Yang Kuifu, Liang Jimin and Zhang Fan (eds), Zhongguo renkou yu jihua shengyu dashi yaolan
(A Chronicle of Major Events in China’s Population and Birth Planning) (Beijing: China Population Press,
2001), p. 38.
13. Yang Kuifu, Liang Jimin and Zhang Fan (eds), Zhongguo renkou yu jihua shengyu dashi yaolan, p. 37.
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as proposed by Mao in his speech in 1957. China also developed its own version
of the contraceptive pill by the mid-1960s and expanded the national distribution
and propaganda network devoted to promoting birth control.
14
We do not have much evidence on what Mao was thinking about population
issues toward the end of his life but, given his supreme position at the time, we
can be sure that he must have signed o on the very decisive shi that China
made from voluntary to mandatory and highly coercive birth planning enforce-
ment aer 1970 (not aer 1980). In 1971, China’s State Council approved a re-
port on birth control, setting the goals of reducing the annual rate of population
growth from 2.5 per cent in 1970 to 1 per cent in cities and 1.5 per cent in rural
areas by 1975 as part of the fourth Five-Year Plan. In 1975 and for the subsequent
Five-Year Plan, birth-control goals were further ramped up, aiming to reduce the
annual rate of population growth from 1.57 per cent in 1975 to 1 per cent in rural
areas and 0.6 per cent in cities by 1980.
15
ese were the policy decisions that
launched China on a dramatically tougher birth planning eort in the closing
years of Mao’s life.
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With these ambitious goals a national campaign of mandatory birth planning was
put into full motion. e slogan that summarized the three demographic com-
ponents of the campaign was “later, longer, and fewer” (wan, xi, shao
晚、稀、少).
“Later” referred to the eort to enforce late marriage—at least aer age 25 for
brides and 27 or 28 for grooms in the city, and aer 23 for brides and 25 for
grooms in the countryside. “Longer” referred to requiring greater intervals be-
tween permitted births—at least four years. “Fewer” meant limits on the number
of births allowed—no more than two children for urban families and three for
rural families, with penalties for those who did not comply.
14. For a contemporary overview of eorts to promote birth planning during the 1950s and 1960s, see
Michael Freeberne, “Birth Control in China”, Population Studies, Vol. 18 (1964), pp. 5–16. Freeberne discusses
the controversy surrounding the role of Peking University president Ma Yinchu in advocating birth planning
in 1957. Later accounts have suggested that Mao was critical of Ma’s advocacy of birth control, and that in the
anti-rightist campaign Ma was criticized and then red from his presidency, thus silencing a voice that could
have helped to slow China’s population growth much earlier. See, for example, “Cuopi yiren, duosheng sanyi”
(One Individual Wrongly Criticized, ree Hundred Million More Births), Guangming ribao (Guangming
Daily) (5 August 1979), p. 3. However, Ma’s statements on the need for birth planning very much echoed
Mao’s own statements from 1957 quoted above, he was never condemned as a rightist, and when he le the
presidency in 1960 he was already 78 years old. Furthermore, voluntary birth planning eorts resumed and
were expanded in the early 1960s, as Freeberne documents. e claim that Ma’s treatment led to the demise of
Chinese birth planning eorts until 1980 thus also belongs in the category of myth.
15. Liang Zhongtang, Zhongguo jihua shengyu shilun (History of China’s Birth Planning Policy) (Beijing:
China Development Press, 2014).
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e post-1970 campaign in no way relied simply upon persuasion or voluntary
compliance. Many of the coercive enforcement techniques that became notori-
ous aer the one-child policy was launched in 1980 actually date from this “later,
longer, fewer” campaign of the 1970s.
16
e state bureaucratic hierarchy in charge
of enforcing birth control then oversaw grass-roots birth planning workers in
each village, urban work unit and neighborhood. ese birth planning enforcers
kept detailed records on each woman of child-bearing age under their respon-
sibility, including past births, contraceptive usage and even menstrual cycles, in
many reported instances becoming “menstrual monitors” who tried to detect
out-of-quota pregnancies at an early stage.
17
In some factories, there were quotas
for reproduction as well as for production, and a woman employee who did not
receive a birth allotment was not supposed to get pregnant (even if she had not
yet reached her two-child maximum). Women who became pregnant without
permission were subjected to regular harassment to get an abortion, with pres-
sure also on their husbands and other family members. In rural areas, women
who gave birth to a third child were similarly pressured to get sterilized or have
IUDs inserted, while urban women were more trusted to continue using eective
contraception until they were no longer fertile (although not trusted enough to
dispense with regular menstrual cycle checks). Families were threatened that, if
they persisted in having an over-quota birth, the baby would be denied house-
hold registration (and thus denied opportunities for ration coupons, schooling
and other essential benets that depended upon registration).
Published statistics from Chinese ocial sources conrm the coercive,
campaign-driven nature of China’s birth planning program in the 1970s. As
shown in Figure 1, although not as extreme as China’s 1983 sterilization and
abortion high tide following the launch of the one-child policy, birth-control op-
erations (abortions, IUD insertions and sterilizations) shot up several times dur-
ing the 1970s in association with the campaign to enforce birth limits. In the early
16. In the interviews which Martin Whyte and William Parish conducted in Hong Kong in 1972–74 with
former residents of Guangdong villages, the early stages of this stricter birth planning enforcement were
described. William Parish and Martin King Whyte, Village and Family in Contemporary China (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1978), pp. 138–54. Similarly, former residents of a variety of cities whom Whyte
and Parish interviewed in Hong Kong in 1977–78 provided details on the enforcement of the “later, longer,
fewer” program in urban China during that period. See Martin King Whyte and William Parish, Urban Life in
Contemporary China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), particularly pp. 160–61.
17. See the translation of one such form used in the early 1970s, in William Parish and Martin King
Whyte, Village and Family in Contemporary China, p. 143. Almost two decades earlier, when China’s rst
voluntary birth planning campaign was being launched during the mid-1950s, a resident French journalist
presciently observed, “I seriously think that this regime is probably the rst in history which could ocially
adopt birth control as a compulsory measure, and make sure that its orders will be universally obeyed . . . And
who will control the birth control? Quite simple: the street committee. It will x the quotas, give advice, and
keep an eye on married couples.” Robert Guillain, 600 Million Chinese (New York: Criterion Books, 1957),
p. 295. While obedience was far from universal aer 1970, the CCP’s grass-roots control structures made it
possible to contemplate enforcing mandatory birth planning.
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days of the “later, longer, fewer” program, IUD insertion, female sterilization and
induced abortions all increased sharply. IUD insertions more than doubled in
two years, from 6.17 million in 1971 to 13.95 million in 1973; female sterilization
operations increased by nearly 70 per cent, from 1.74 million to 2.95 million;
and induced abortions increased by 30 per cent, from 3.91 to 5.11 million. By
1975, the number of IUD insertions, female sterilizations and induced abortions
all reached historic highs at levels that were, respectively, 270 per cent, 217 per
cent and 130 per cent of the levels in 1971. 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. Female sterilizations more than doubled in the same one-year period, from
2.51 to 5.29 million, and induced abortions rose from 5.39 to 7.86 million. ese
drastic increases in birth-control operations can hardly be construed as indica-
tive of voluntary birth planning.
Prior to 1980, abuses resulting from eorts to enforce fertility limits also be-
came common. Just prior to the launch of the one-child policy, Steven Mosher re-
ported that dozens of “over-quota” pregnant women in his rural Guangdong eld
'JHVSF Number of birth-control operations in China, 1971–2006
Source: Ministry of Health of China, Zhongguo weisheng tongji nianjian (China Health Statistics
Yearbook [2010]) (Beijing: Peking Union Medical College Press, 2010). Sterilization numbers in-
clude both male and female sterilizations.
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site during 1979–80 were ordered conned in the brigade headquarters, not able
to go home for days, if not weeks, while being subjected to harangues to get them
to consent to abortions. He also documented local instances of third trimester
“Caesarean abortions”
18
more than three decades prior to Feng Jianmei’s forced
late-term abortion, which became an Internet sensation in 2012.
19
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It is thus clear that highly coercive birth planning enforcement was already the
order of the day during the 1970s, in both rural and urban areas, and preced-
ing the launching of the one-child policy. e record is equally clear that China
during that decade experienced among the most dramatic declines in fertility
in human history. Far from being “out of control”, China’s fertility declined very
substantially aer 1970, attaining levels that are unusually low for a poor agrar-
ian society, although not quite dropping to replacement level. As Figure 2 shows,
China’s total fertility rate fell from close to six around 1970 to only 2.7–2.8 at the
end of the decade. us, at least 70 per cent of the decline in fertility from 1970
up to the present was achieved prior to the launching of the one-child policy,
not aerward. (Note that, in their article, Wei and Zhang show that a similarly
dramatic drop in fertility occurred in Yicheng, as well as in Shanxi Province gen-
erally, prior to the launching of the one-child policy, rather than following that
launch—see their Figure 3, p. 113.) Although economic modernization and the
increased availability of contraceptives contributed somewhat to the sharp fertil-
ity decline prior to 1980, particularly in urban areas, there can be no doubt that
coercive enforcement of state-mandated limits on births played the dominant
role.
20
If China’s rate of population growth was already sharply reduced by stricter
birth planning enforcement in the 1970s, why was the even more coercive one-
child policy launched, starting in 1980?
21
e answer to this puzzle is already
18. Steven Mosher, Broken Earth: e Rural Chinese (New York: e Free Press, 1983), Chapter 9. Mosher
reports that “high tides” of birth planning enforcement occurred regularly aer 1978 in his village.
19. Evan Osnos, “Abortion and Politics in China”, e New Yorker (15 June 2012), available at http://www
.newyorker.com/news/evan-osnos/abortion-and-politics-in-china, last accessed 2 February 2015. In Feng’s
case, injections rather than surgery were used to abort her seven-month fetus, and pictures which a relative
took of the mother in the hospital lying beside her stillborn daughter were widely circulated.
20. See the discussion in Arthur Wolf, “e Preeminent Role of Government Intervention in China’s
Family Revolution”, Population and Development Review, Vol. 12 (1986), pp. 101–16.
21. Initially in 1980 there were eorts to promote a limit of one birth for all Han Chinese, although not for
ethnic minorities. However, the diculties of enforcing a one-child limit, particularly in the countryside, led
to a compromise rule being applied in most rural areas from 1984 to the present (following the 1983 peak of
coercive enforcement, as shown in Figure 1). e most common formula is a “1.5-children rule”: if the rst-
born child is a son, the couple is supposed to stop, but if it is a daughter they are allowed to have one more
$IBMMFOHJOH.ZUITBCPVU$IJOBT0OF$IJME1PMJDZ t
available in prior research, including Susan Greenhalgh’s 2008 book, Just One
Child: Science and Policy in Deng’s China, and more recently Liang Zhongtang’s
2014 book, History of China’s Birth Planning Policy.
22
Briey, the urgent search by
child, aer which they should stop (even if the second child is also a daughter). However, in two populous
provinces, Jiangsu and Sichuan, almost all residents, even in rural areas, are expected to obey the one-child
limit. So, while it would be an oversimplication, or even another myth, to claim that China has adopted a
one-child rule for everyone since 1980, nonetheless close to two-thirds of the population would end up having
only one child if local regulations on birth limits as of the late 1990s were strictly obeyed by all. On the nature
of local variations in birth limits across China and the proportion of the population falling under a one-child
limit, see Gu Baochang, Wang Feng, Guo Zhigang and Zhang Erli, “China’s Local and National Fertility
Policies at the End of the Twentieth Century”, Population and Development Review, Vol. 33 (2007), pp. 129–47.
22. Susan Greenhalgh, Just One Child; Liang Zhongtang, Zhongguo jihua shengyu shilun. See also Liang
Zhongtang, Zhongguo shengyu zhengce yanjiu (Research on China’s Birth Control Policy) (Taiyuan: Shanxi
Renmin Chubanshe, 2014).
'JHVSF Total fertility rate trends in China, 1951–2011
Note: TFRs for 1951–90 are from Yao Xinwu (comp.), Zhongguo shengyu shujuji (Fertility Data
of China) (Beijing: China Population Press, 1995). TFRs for 1991–2011 are calculated based on
age-specic fertility data published in National Bureau of Statistics of China, Zhongguo renkou
(yu jiuye) tongji nianjian (China Population [and Employment] Statistics Yearbook [1991–2012])
(Beijing: China Statistics Press). (Data broken down by rural versus urban are not available for
1991–94 and 1996.) ese age-specic fertility data are not adjusted for underreporting prob-
lems that are not uncommon for this period, but the raw data reect well the fertility trends in
China, as shown in Yong Cai, “China’s New Demographic Reality: Learning from the 2010 Census”,
Population and Development Review, Vol. 39 (2013), pp. 371–96.
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Deng and other post-Mao leaders to nd any conceivable way to increase the per
capita economic growth rate led to a strong desire among the Party leadership for
a birth-control program that was even more restrictive than in the 1970s. Already
in 1978, the Chinese leadership began contemplating the need for a one-child
policy.
23
Even more ambitious ocial fertility control targets found a ready and
purportedly scientic rationale aer 1979 in demographic projections produced
by a small group of scientists headed by Song Jian, who were inuenced by the
Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth and other Western doomsday writings in the
1970s.
24
At a time when the country’s population was already approaching 1 bil-
lion (the 1982 census counted 1.008 billion Chinese), they asserted that it was
necessary for China to reach zero population growth as rapidly as possible. ey
also claimed that China’s optimal population ca. 2080 was 700 million or less,
and that only a total fertility rate of closer to one rather than two or higher would
enable China to reach this long-run optimal population. eir pseudo-scientic
claims and projections, based upon ideas that have since been widely criticized
and largely discredited in the West, oered a scientic-sounding justication for
China’s even more draconian one-child policy.
25
e trend data in Figure 2 also make it clear that the launching of the one-
child policy was not followed by a sustained further decline in fertility. Rather,
aer an initial drop in 1980, China’s overall fertility rebounded upward and then
uctuated for most of the rest of the decade. So, despite the massive increase in
coercive enforcement that the new policy precipitated (1983 was a particularly
dreadful year—China performed 14.4 million abortions, 20.7 million steriliza-
tions and 17.8 million IUD insertions that year; see Figure 1), China did not
initially have much success in producing a further decline in fertility.
26
23. e historical record is still unclear about the decision-making process lying behind the one-child
policy. Chen Muhua, who was newly charged with developing an even more restrictive fertility regime, played
a critical role in pushing for a one-child policy. It is reasonable to assume that she had strong support from
leaders such as Hua Guofeng and Deng Xiaoping.
24. Donella H. Meadows, Dennis L. Meadows, Jørgen Randers and William W. Behrens III, e Limits to
Growth: A Report for the Club of Rome’s Project on the Predicament of Mankind (New York: Universe Books,
1972). Song Jian was a former rocket scientist who rose to become a State Councilor, member of the Central
Committee of the Chinese Communist Party and President of the Chinese Academy of Engineering. In the
late 1970s, he became centrally involved in making demographic projections, using his access to computers
and his political connections to increasingly dominate debates among professional demographers about
China’s population policy, as described by Greenhalgh and Liang.
25. See the details provided in Susan Greenhalgh, Just One Child, particularly p. 158. For one biting
critique of the Club of Rome projections, see Julian Simon, e Ultimate Resource (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1981). Past research also shows that China could have approached or reached replacement
level fertility with a further implementation of a “two children with spacing” requirement, rather than
the more drastic one-child limit that became ocial policy. John Bongaarts and Susan Greenhalgh, “An
Alternative to the One-Child Policy in China”, Population and Development Review, Vol. 11 (1985),
pp. 585–617.
26. e rebound in fertility in 1981 and 1982 was partly a result of a sharp reduction in the average age
of rst marriage in China aer 1980. Aer the launching of the one-child policy, with its overwhelming
$IBMMFOHJOH.ZUITBCPVU$IJOBT0OF$IJME1PMJDZ t
A further sustained decline in China’s fertility to sub-replacement levels began
only toward the end of the 1980s, as shown in Figure 2. Some of this further de-
cline can be attributed to a change in the system of enforcement. Instead of the
primary burden for enforcement falling on grass-roots birth planning workers,
most of them middle-aged women, major responsibility shied to more pow-
erful actors—local Party secretaries and other ocials (overwhelmingly men).
Achieving success in keeping the number of births down became one of the
key criteria used in the annual performance ratings of local ocials. Under the
“one-veto rule”, an ocial who failed to meet birth-control targets in his locality
could be denied promotion or even lose his post, even if the local performance
was acceptable regarding economic growth and other evaluation criteria. (e
new rule’s initial eect can be seen in the spikes in birth-control operations in
1991 shown in Figure 1.) Still, it would be highly misleading to attribute the at-
tainment and maintenance of sub-replacement fertility or even the overall trend
toward lower fertility since 1970 solely to the post-1980 policy or to China’s co-
ercive birth planning enforcement. is brings us to the nal myth that needs to
be challenged—the claim that the one-child policy is responsible for preventing
400 million excess births, producing manifold benets for China and for the rest
of the world.
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.*--*0/#*35)4
Of all the myths that have circulated regarding the one-child policy, the one
that has gained the most currency recently is that it has prevented 400 million
births. Supporters of the policy argue that such a huge number of prevented
births not only fueled China’s dramatic post-1978 economic boom, as claimed
by the Chinese government, but also contributed to global well-being.
27
For ex-
emphasis on fertility reduction, the “later” part of the 1970s birth planning campaign was neglected.
Simultaneously in 1980 a revision of the Marriage Law of the People’s Republic of China was promulgated.
While on the surface it appeared that the 1980 revision required higher minimum ages of marriage than the
original 1950 Marriage Law (20 for females and 22 for males, compared with 18 and 20 in the 1950 version),
the actual eect was to make it easier for couples and their parents to demand to have marriages registered at
ages younger than the “late marriage” ages of the 1970s campaign. Nationally, the mean age of rst marriage
for both males and females dropped by about 2 full years aer 1980 and only gradually started increasing aer
that, with marriage ages in 1990 still younger than in 1980 (Deborah Davis and Sara Friedman [eds], Wives,
Husbands, and Lovers: Marriage and Sexuality in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Urban China [Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2014], Table 1.1, p. 7.) Marriage age reduction was responsible for at least 16 per cent of
the rise in fertility in 1981 (Grith Feeney, Wang Feng, Mingkun Zhou and Baoyu Xiao, “Recent Fertility
Dynamics in China: Results from the 1987 One Percent Population Survey”, Population and Development
Review, Vol. 15 [1989], pp. 297–322).
27. Critics of the policy also cite the estimate of 400 million births prevented. See, for example, http://
www.cnsnews.com/news/article/penny-starr/400-million-lives-prevented-through-one-child-policy-chinese
-ocial-says, last accessed 5 February 2015.
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ample, a 20 September 2014 special report in e Economist on global eorts to
curb greenhouse gas emissions ranks China’s one-child policy as the fourth most
important policy or action contributing toward this goal in recent decades, aer
the Montreal Protocol, worldwide use of hydroelectric power and the spread of
nuclear power. e one-child policy is credited with producing a cumulative re-
duction of 1.3 billion tons of carbon emissions in China as of 2005.
28
It is already clear from our discussion above that most of China’s fertility
decline cannot be attributed to the one-child policy, since the decline largely
occurred prior to the policy’s launch. How was the number of 400 million gen-
erated, and how credible is it? Our research reveals that the original calculation
of the number of births prevented came from an internal study sponsored by
China’s National Population and Birth Planning Commission in the late 1990s,
a study which was based on overly simplistic and unrealistic assumptions.
29
is
“number of births prevented” claim has subsequently been utilized by Chinese
government ocials to showcase the success of China’s birth-control program.
e estimate of the number of prevented births was based on a study whose re-
sults are displayed in Figure 3. Basically, the report used a straight line to portray
the overall fertility trend between 1950 and 1970 based on adjusted crude birth
rates, and then simply extrapolated this line forward into later years, based upon
the (mistaken) assumption that this extrapolation provided an accurate projection
of what China’s fertility would have been in the absence of birth planning cam-
paigns.
30
e report’s projected crude birth rate for China in 1990 was 29.71 per
thousand, and for 1998 28.43 per thousand, as shown in the top line in Figure 3.
By comparing the births that would have occurred under this scenario and the
observed actual birth rates (shown as the bottom line in Figure 3), the report’s
authors arrived at their estimate of the cumulative number of births “prevented”.
For the period between 1970 and 1998, they concluded that this number was 338
million. In the decade aer this study, not only was the starting date conveniently
shied forward from 1970 to 1980 (thus redirecting attention to the one-child
policy), but also the number of births prevented was inated to 400 million.
e claim that China’s one-child policy prevented 400 million births contains
at least three fatal aws. First, the number is based on a “what if” scenario that is
completely unrealistic. e projected trajectory of crude birth rates, as shown by
28. http://www.economist.com/news/brieng/21618680-our-guide-actions-have-done-most-slow-global
-warming-deepest-cuts, last accessed 5 February 2015. e Economist cites a statement by a Chinese Foreign
Ministry spokesman in 2007 as the basis for the specic carbon emissions reduction estimate (which was
based on a more modest gure at that time of 300 million births prevented).
29. Wang Feng and Cai Yong, “Siyi Zhongguoren shi zenmo shaoshengde?” (Did China’s One-Child Policy
Prevent 400 Million Births in the Last 30 Years?), Zhongguo gaige (China Reform), Vol. 7 (2010), pp. 85–88;
Wang Feng, Yong Cai and Baochang Gu, “Population, Policy, and Politics”.
30. According to ocial statistics, China’s crude birth rate in 1950 was 37.0 per thousand, and in 1970 it
was 33.4 per thousand.
$IBMMFOHJOH.ZUITBCPVU$IJOBT0OF$IJME1PMJDZ t
the top line in Figure 3, severely underestimates the decline in fertility that would
have occurred in the absence of China’s birth-control programs. is problem
can be seen by comparing China with the real experiences of countries that had
birth rates similar to China’s in the 1970s but did not have mandatory birth-
control programs. e middle line of Figure 3 shows this comparison. ere were
16 countries in 1970 with a population of a million or more that had crude birth
rates of between 30 and 38 per thousand, with an average crude birth rate of
35.55 per thousand, slightly above China’s level at the time, which was 33.43 per
thousand.
31
In the years aer 1970, the average birth rate of these 16 countries
declined to 26.6 per thousand by 1990, and to 21.96 by 1998, signicantly be-
low the predicted values of the “China births prevented” estimate. By predicting
31. e 16 countries are Albania, Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, Jamaica, North Korea, South Korea,
Lebanon, Malaysia, Panama, Paraguay, South Africa, ailand, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Venezuela. (Sri
Lanka also qualied, with a crude birth rate of 30.9 and a population of 12 million in 1970, but it was excluded
from the study because data were missing for 1998.)
'JHVSF Calculations behind “400 million births prevented”
Note: Observed crude birth rates for China are taken from China National Bureau of Statistics,
Zhongguo tongji nianjian (China Statistics Yearbook [2012]) (Beijing: China Statistical Press,
2013). Linear extrapolation from 1950 to 1970 is from Yang Kuifu, Chen Shengli and Wei Jinsheng
(eds), Zhongguo jihua shengyu xiaoyi yu touru (e Costs and Benets of China’s Birth Planning)
(Beijing: People’s Press, 2000). e average for selected “comparable” countries is calculated using
data from the World Bank’s World Development Indicator database.
t 5)&$)*/"+063/"-/P
a birth rate that is unrealistically high—17 per cent higher than the average of
the comparison group as of 1990, 29 per cent higher in 1998, and as much as 45
per cent higher in 2005—the estimate of total births prevented is clearly a wild
exaggeration.
e second fatal aw with the simplistic “births prevented” estimate is its ne-
glect of a particular feature of China’s process of fertility decline, namely, that the
major part of the fertility decline occurred in the 1970s, prior to the one-child
policy. e drastic pre-1980 decline in China’s actual birth rates, as shown in the
bottom line of Figure 3, had far-reaching consequences. e contraception, abor-
tion and sterilization campaigns that resulted in the rapid decline in the birth rate
during the 1970s had long-lasting eects well beyond that decade. e smaller
birth cohorts of the 1970s that resulted from this decline laid the foundation for
smaller numbers of births 20 years later and beyond, when those smaller birth
cohorts entered reproductive ages.
e third fatal problem with the “400 million births prevented” claim is that
it totally ignores the most signicant source of fertility decline worldwide: eco-
nomic development. As the popular slogan has it, “economic development is the
best contraceptive”. China’s dramatic post-1978 economic boom and the pro-
found social changes unleashed by rising incomes and levels of education and
rapid urbanization would have driven down birth rates even in the absence of
state birth planning campaigns. Given the much more rapid pace of economic
and social change in China than in any of the 16 comparison countries used in
Figure 3, it is highly likely that the trajectory of birth rate decline in China aer
1980 due to this source alone would have been steeper than the average for the
16 comparison countries, and therefore even closer to the observed birth rate
changes, as shown in the bottom line in Figure 3. In sum, the claim that China’s
one-child policy prevented 400 million births is entirely bogus. While the earlier
“later, longer, fewer” mandatory birth planning campaign launched under Mao
Zedong did drive China’s fertility levels down to levels below what would be ex-
pected for a country at China’s economic development level at that time, in the
period since 1980 it is debatable how much of China’s further fertility decline can
be attributed to the one-child policy.
32
We conclude by oering our own summary of the historical record to replace
the myths with which we began:
1. Despite Mao Zedong’s earlier declarations that a large and rapidly growing pop-
ulation was not a problem for China, he was still in charge when a dramatic shi
from voluntary to mandatory birth planning occurred aer 1970. Birth planning
32. Yong Cai, “China’s Below-Replacement Fertility: Government Policy or Socioeconomic
Development?”, Population and Development Review, Vol. 36 (2010), pp. 419–40.
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was already being coercively enforced during the 1970s under the “later, longer,
fewer” campaign, prior to the launching of the one-child policy in 1980.
2. Rather than continuing to experience out-of-control population growth, China
during the 1970s recorded a dramatic decline in fertility rates, with the bulk of
the decline in fertility from 1970 to the present achieved in that decade. Birth-
control programs in the 1970s cannot be portrayed as voluntary, as they relied
on mass campaigns and heavy coercion in order to try to meet government
birth-limitation targets.
3. e even more coercive one-child campaign was based on politics and pseudo-
science, rather than on necessity, much less on good demography. China could
have achieved further progress in lowering fertility with some version of a two-
child policy, a choice that would have sharply reduced the human suering
caused aer 1980. Despite the widespread coercion and abuses connected to the
new policy, it was not in fact very successful initially in reducing fertility levels
further. Fertility rates uctuated through most of the 1980s and only resumed
their decline toward today’s sub-replacement levels at the end of the decade.
4. While a substantial portion of China’s dramatic decline in fertility rates since
1970 can be attributed to the implementation of mandatory birth control, it
is highly misleading to claim that the one-child policy successfully prevented
400 million extra births.
33
Despite the coercive ferocity of the campaign, China’s
rapid economic development since 1980 deserves the lion’s share of the credit
for the (much more modest) numbers of reduced births that have occurred as
the country’s total fertility rate further declined, from about 2.7–2.8 at the end
of the 1970s to perhaps 1.4–1.5 today. It is a damning indictment of the Chinese
record that all of her Confucian neighbors in East Asia achieved rapid declines
to their present sub-replacement fertility rates via robust economic growth sup-
plemented by voluntary birth planning campaigns, thus avoiding the massive
abuses that China’s misguided launching of the one-child program produced.
33. Even if one uses a lower and more realistic estimate of the reduction in the number of births that can
be attributed to coercive birth planning since 1970, the claim that China has beneted greatly as a result is
yet another myth. Such a claim ignores the very serious problems that China is now facing as a result of its
peculiar demographic history, including a rapidly aging population, rising labor costs and a highly distorted
sex ratio. See the discussion in Wang Feng, Yong Cai and Baochang Gu, “Population, Policy, and Politics”.
