China\'s One Child Policy in the Last

China's One Child Policy

In the last part of the 20th Century, China, also known as the "sleeping giant," has transformed itself from a predominantly rural, pre-industrialized society to a political and economic challenger. Since the Maoist Revolution of 1949, also known as the Great Patriotic Revolution, China has transformed itself from a feudal system to one of the world's faster growing economies globally. China is huge -- in both geography and population. Over the last few decades it has experienced unprecedented economic growth with an average GDP of well over 10%. Even though the actual per capita income is still within the lower-middle category of global statistics, China still remains the third largest economy in the world. Modern China participates with a major role in the global economy, and organizations within the developed world take China quite seriously. China's own view of her economy is "Socialism with Chinese Characteristics," allowing state control over much of the economy with smatterings of private enterprise (Chinese Government, 2010).

In the early Mao years, especially in the 1950s, the logic was that the only way China could rapidly industrialize was to increase manpower. Mao himself saw people as one of the most precious of China's resources, and the push to provide more workers in both the agricultural and industrialized sectors was rampant. In fact, the population grew so drastically that by the mid-1970s, some of the country's resources were becoming scarce. Just a few years after Mao's death, in fact, the One-Child Policy, to Chinese known as "Policy of Birth Planning," was introduced. Chinese officials say that about 36 per cent of China's population is subject to the rule, and that between 1979 and 2011, the policy prevented at least 400 million births (Fong, 2004; 400 Million Births, 2011).

The policy is controversial both within and outside of China, as are the government's figures. The policy seems to be implemented in different ways depending on local officials, and has been implicated in an increase in forced abortion, female infanticide, underreporting of female births, and even slavery. Some suggest that it is a possible cause of China's gender imbalance, as well as a schism between rural and urban populations. "As many critics have pointed out, statistics and ethnography are both flawed methods of representing reality" (Fong, 25). Because the policy is official, bureaucrats at all levels have vested interests in maintaining certain quotas and statistics. In all likelihood, various issues are individually interdependent with location, personality of officials, and family circumstances.