" Deng's one child policy, moreover, had been one of the most important insurance plans put in place to insure the speed and power of Chinese capitalist development. What this mean was that Deng chose to channel the capital surplus of the Chinese people into factories, railroads, power plants, and the damming the Yangtze River with the massive Three Gorges Dam, rather than into an ever larger Chinese population.

Deng's One Child Policy: Positive and Negative

As often happens in periods of massive change in human history, the results of Deng's one child policy were partly good and partly bad. Let's begin with some of the negative consequences of Deng's policy. Most noticeable is the fact that there are more "little emperors" than there are "little empresses" in China today. Because another aspect of Deng's population policy was abortion on demand, many young Chinese who were about to become parents decided to abort fetuses that would have developed into little Chinese girls. At present, therefore, there is something approaching a demographic...

Reported cases include coercion, forced sterilization, forced abortion, and possibly infanticide. Most reports of these aberrations of basic human rights are impossible to trace and most come from China's remote rural regions. The human rights issue, while very important, does not, however, reflect a sense of the real crisis going on in China today which is a potential demographic crisis. What some critical voices have been predicting is that there is something happing in China that is somewhat more troubling than the existence of massage parlors in most Chinese hotels. What has given rise to concern is the possibility that China's traditional population pyramid is being bent out of shape.
China's Ageing Problem

Instead of the traditional population pattern with small numbers of "elderly" people at the point of the pyramid and a wide base of hard working and high earning younger people at the bottom, the shape of the Chinese population at present is somewhat more like a rectangular prism than a pyramid. Fewer children at the bottom of China's demographic portrait could mean that