China’s one-child policy

Wang Feng is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Irvine, and at Fudan University in Shanghai, China. He is also a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution. Between 2010 and 2013, he served as a Senior Fellow and Director of the Brookings-Tsinghua Center for Public Policy in Beijing. Wang Feng received his Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Michigan. Between 1989 and 1996, he was a Research Fellow at the East-West Center.

More information

Wang Feng (2013), Bringing an End to a Senseless Policy. China’s ‘One-Child’ Rule Should Be Scrapped The New York Times November 19,  2013

Shanghai-China announced last week that it would loosen its famous “one-child” policy, enforced since 1980. The world’s most controversial birth-control policy, initially imposed as an emergency measure at the start of the economic reforms of Deng Xiaoping, seems to finally be on its way out, more than a generation later.

This change, however, has come rather late, and it is still highly limited. Since its inception more than 30 years ago, China has made only one set of adjustments to the policy. In the mid-1980s, responding to a backlash of violence and abuse associated with enforcement of the policy, the government allowed rural couples with only a girl to have a second child (so the parents could try for a son) and, later on, couples who are both only children could have a second child. Now couples will be allowed to have two children if just one parent is an only child.

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Feng Wang, Yong Cai and Baochang Gu (2013) Population, Policy, and Politics: How Will History Judge China’s One-Child Policy? Population and Development Review 38 (Supplement): 115–129 (2012)

One of the main puzzles of modern population and social history is why, among all countries confronting rapid population growth in the second half of the twentieth century, China chose to adopt an extreme measure of birth control known as the one-child policy. a related question is why such a policy, acknowledged to have many undesirable consequences, has been retained for so long, even beyond the period of time anticipated by its creators.

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Why China Needs More Babies 11/18/2013

China is easing its one-child policy as part of a blueprint of economic and social reforms drawn up by the Communist Party leadership. Professor and demographer Feng Wang tells Deborah Kan why the country needs more babies to support its aging population.

 

Jacqueline Nivard

Jacqueline Nivard, Centre d'études sur la Chine moderne et contemporaine

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OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Jacqueline Nivard (December 11, 2013). China’s one-child policy. URBACHINA. Retrieved July 19, 2025 from https://doi.org/10.58079/v2mz


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