SPRING 2014
mester and can be conducted under lessthan-ideal safety conditions. They are a
sore topic for Beijing’s leadership, which
is often pressured by human rights organizations to ensure that such abortions stop.
Yet while the urban Chinese clearly
have reason to follow the one-child policy, the rural Chinese see many reasons to
disregard it. When Deng Xiaoping enact-
INTERNATIONAL
veloping countries between 1970 and
1998. Indeed, some argue that the onechild policy was not necessary and that
the birthrate in China would have fallen
naturally as it modernized. If this argument is correct, then the strict conditions
of the one-child policy may have been for
nothing. Moreover, many families in the
rising urban population of China would
completely exempt from the policy; for
example, non-Han Chinese – who make
up about nine percent of China’s population – are exempt because the Chinese
government did not believe forcing the
policy on these minorities would be
worth the political dissent that would
arise. Moreover, because many of these
ethnic minorities live in areas where the
Some argue that the one-child policy was not necessary and
that the birthrate in China would have fallen naturally as it
modernized. If this argument is correct, then the strict conditions of the one-child policy may have been for nothing.
ed his initial reforms and freed up farmland for private ownership, the household
– rather than the township – became the
unit of production in agriculture. As a result, the number of workers in the household became important, because the more
family members there were to work on
the farm, the more productive the farm
could be. Because of this, rural farmers
have found it acceptable to ignore the
one-child policy, stomaching the penalties of having extra children in order to
have a larger family and the additional
work capacity it brings; the assumption
is that the increased profits from farming
will far exceed any fines for having extra
children. In addition, the incentives that
the Chinese government offers its people to comply with the one-child policy
have little weight in rural China. Rural
peasants tend to build their own homes
– rather than purchase them – and only
send their children to school for a couple of years until they can start working.
Thus, fertility rates tend to be much higher for rural Chinese than urban Chinese.
The Chinese Communist Party claims
that the one-child policy has prevented
400 million births since its inception in
1979. Nonetheless, many disagree with
that figure; The New York Times points
out that the birthrate in China changed
similarly to the birthrates of other de-
prefer to only have one child regardless
of whether or not there was a policy in
place, and China has been urbanizing at
a rapid rate. According to June Teufel
Dreyer, author of China’s Political System: Modernization and Tradition, only
twenty-six percent of the Chinese population lived in urban areas in 1990, while
in 2009, forty-four percent did. As this
trend continues, one would expect birth
rates to decline in parallel. Living in a
Chinese city is costly – education and
healthcare are particularly expensive –
and the rising Chinese middle class simply cannot afford more than one child.
In both China and the rest of the world,
urban families have fewer children than
rural families, and as a country becomes
more modernized, the birthrate falls.
Moreover, it must be noted that the
one-child policy actually does not apply to the majority of Chinese people.
China’s National Population and Family
Planning Commission reports that only
forty percent of the Chinese population
– or 150 million Chinese households – )