China has officially ended their one-child policy, allowing couples to have two children for the first time in over three decades.
The announcement followed a four-day Communist party summit in Beijing where China’s top leaders debated financial reforms and how to maintain growth at a time of heightened concerns about the economy.
But why was the policy first implemented?
In the late 1970’s China introduced the one-birth policy as a measure to reduce the country’s birth rate and slow down the population growth rate.
In 1950, China’s rate of population change was 1.9 per cent each year. This may not sound too high, however, a country needs a growth rate of only 3 per cent for the population of the country to double in less than 24 years.
Previous Chinese governments had had encouraged people to have a lot of children to increase the country’s workforce, but by the 1970’s the government realised the current rates of population growth would soon become unsustainable.
Benefits promised by the policy included increased access to education for all, plus childcare and healthcare offered to families that followed this rule. However, it was largely resisted in rural areas where it was traditional to have large families.
Couples who did not follow the one-child policy didn’t receive the benefits and were fined. People in China also claimed that some women who became pregnant after they had already has a child were forced to have an abortion and many women were forcibly sterilised.
Due to the traditional preference for boys in China, large numbers of female babies have ended up homeless or in orphanages. In 2000 it was reported that 90 per cent of foetuses that were aborted in China were female. As a result of this, gender balance of the Chinese population has become distorted and it is thought that today, men outnumber women by more than 60 million.
Although there were many problems that came from the introduction of the policy, the birth rate did subsequently fall, and the rate of population currently sits at around 0.7 per cent.
But will the change in policy be good for China?