Population Policy.
Population Control Poster, Beijing, China This street
scene in Beijing shows a poster for the one-child population
control policy instituted by the Chinese government. To curb the
growth of a population already around 1.2 billion, the Chinese
government has adopted numerous measures to encourage the
majority of Chinese to have only one child. The more drastic
measures, including coerced or forcible abortion, have attracted
considerable international condemnation.
The first national census since the Communist takeover was
compiled in 1953, in an effort to assess the human resources
available for the first five-year plan. At that time, the
population of China was found to be 582,600,000. A second census,
taken in 1964, showed an increase to 694,580,000; the third, in
1982, revealed a population (excluding Hong Kong, Macau, and
Taiwan) of 1,008,180,000, making China the first nation ever to
pass the billion mark. Between 1953 and 2001, the death rate
dropped from 22.5 to about 7 per 1,000 population, while the
birth rate declined from about 45 per 1,000 to 16. Life
expectancy at birth in 2001 was 70 years for men and 74 years for
women. The net natural increase declined from about 22.5 per
1,000 in 1953 to 13 per 1,000 in 1991. Nevertheless, at that rate
China would still show an annual population growth of nearly 18
million, leading to a projected 1.3 billion Chinese by the year
2000.
The decrease in fertility recorded between the 1950s and 1990s
was largely effected by government efforts to promote late
marriages and, more recently, to induce the Chinese family to
have only one child. This programme has been coupled with the
continual expansion of public health facilities that provide
birth-control information and contraceptive devices at little or
no cost. It was officially estimated in 1984 that 70 per cent of
all married couples of childbearing age were using contraception,
and that 24 million couples had formally pledged to have no more
than one child. Abortion is legal, and social pressures, or more
drastic official action, are applied to terminate a pregnancy
with women who already have one child or more. Since 1988 a
second child has been allowed, four years after the first, to
peasant couples whose first child was a girl. The national
minorities have generally been excluded from the government.s
birth-control programme, in keeping with a policy of allowing the
non-Han peoples a maximum of cultural independence.
In 1980 the government reported that 65 per cent of the
population was under 30 years of age. Thus, a substantial
proportion of the Chinese population will be of childbearing age
for at least the next several decades. In September 1982, the
leadership of the Chinese Communist Party declared that the
nation must limit the population to 1.2 billion by the end of the
century, a goal requiring an intensification of population
control efforts, but already exceeded by 1995. The measures
adopted, including forcible abortion late in pregnancy, have led
both to widespread worldwide condemnation and to problems such as
female infanticide and kidnapping of women, as the Chinese
attempt to reconcile population control with traditional
pressures for large families and male heirs.
