For 35 years the one-child policy loomed large in Western perceptions of China, and news that Beijing will now permit all couples a second child has prompted a spate of commentary. The policy’s origins, however, are not widely known. Perhaps they are felt to be self-evident. This draconian measure might seem to have been a stereotypically Chinese response to a crisis of overpopulation, shaped by Asiatic traditions of state supremacy and implemented with Maoist brutality. But that description is almost entirely wrong.
First, the one-child policy wasn’t Maoist. It was proposed in 1979, three years after Mao Zedong died. It was adopted the following year under the rule of Deng Xiaoping, the modernizing pragmatist. Mao had been hostile to population control; he contributed to the policy only indirectly, by leaving the social sciences in a damaged and demoralized condition.
Second, it is debatable whether China was having a population crisis in the 1970s. The population was large and rising, true, and concern over the gap between the needs of the population and the productive power of the economy was growing. Today it is obvious that the economy needed to be organized along different lines, but back then Deng’s turn toward the free market still lay in the future, and the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party seized upon population as the problem. By 1975, population-control targets had been added to the Five-Year Plan........To Read More..
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