China has been one of the world's most populated countries since the second century A.D., when it had more than 60 million people, or one-fourth of the world's population, during the Han Dynasty. Although the population dwindled over the next thousand years, it doubled between 1749 and 1811 during the Qing Dynasty. The population of China continued to increase over the next century, and during the first census in 1953, it was found to be more than 583 million people. In 1999, China's population was found to be at its peak, at 6 billion, but it has decreased in the last decade --- today it stands at about 1.25 billion.
Efforts
Up until the time between 1958 and 1963, the country was able to produce enough resources to sustain its population. This included developing higher yielding rice seeds and introducing new crops during the Ming and Qing dynasties, which lasted until 1911. In 1958, the country's population had increased to over a billion, and the death rates were low while the birth rates were high. It was during this time that the country's leader, Mao Zedong, tried to develop a plan to further develop agriculture and industry in China. He attempted to do this by placing people in communes of 5,000 families each where they would share tools, animals and other supplies. Factories began to produce poor equipment, and the country began to have poor growing years because of floods and drought. The result was a country-wide famine that killed 20 million people. Because of this failure, a number of policies in the country were changed in order to try to accommodate the growing population.
Effects
After the Great Leap Forward, leaders in the country began to try to find ways to regenerate the country. In order to do this, the moderates who ran the country reinstalled private land ownership and provided incentives to get people to produce as much food as possible to accommodate the population. The Great Leap Forward had decimated the population, as the fertility rate decreased while the mortality rate increased, so one of the goals of the regime was to find ways to regenerate the population of the country. During the period after the Great Leap Forward, the population once again began to increase. The growth over the next decade meant that in the 1970s the country again felt it was necessary to take measures that would help control its population.
Population Control
When the country started to have problems accommodating the growing population, the Chinese government developed a system to try to limit the number of people born in the country. In 1970, it started with a program called "later-longer-fewer," which tried to get people to have fewer children and have babies farther apart. In 1979, it developed the "one child" policy, which officially defined how many children people could have. The policy said that in urban areas, people could only have one child, and it was strictly enforced. In rural areas, a second child is permitted five years after the first. Three children are only allowed in areas that are under populated or for members of certain ethnic groups.
Birth Control
The effect of the "one child policy" has been that more women have access to birth control in China. Although most of these women do not get choices of contraception, most Chinese females of reproductive ages are on contraception that has been chosen by their doctors. About 87 percent of married women use contraception. Abortion is also a method that is used to control the number of births in the country, but the number of women seeking abortions is lower in China than in the United States. The number of births in China has decreased as a result of the policy --- the average family size is 1.7 children compared to 2.9 in 1979. One issue is that a number of people have abortions when they find out that they are having girl babies, even though this practice is illegal. In rural areas, people are allowed to have two children more quickly if the first child is a girl, but sex selection has been an issue for them as well on the second birth.
Significance
There have been consequences to fewer girls being born in the country, which the government has tried to rectify. One of the issues has been that the number of men of marriage age in the country are outnumbering women, which means that there are a lack of Chinese females for them to start families with. This has meant that a number of men have brought in women either to marry or for sex trafficking, and the number of people with HIV and AIDS in China has gone up. The government has tried to change attitudes in the country about girls, promoting them as being important to families in the same way as boys.
Consequences
China's "one child policy" has helped to control the population of younger individuals, but this is quickly becoming an issue as members of the older generation are entering their senior years and experiencing health issues. According to Toshiko Kaneda in the article "China's Concern Over Population Aging and Health," there are 102 million people in China who are 65 years or older, and there are not enough younger people to pay for their rising healthcare costs. The Chinese healthcare system became privatized in the 1980s, which meant a rise in healthcare costs. Many people are also starting to become ill and die from chronic diseases such as cancer, chronic respiratory disease and cardiovascular disease, Many need long-term care. More long-term care facilities have been developed in the country because women can no longer take care of the elderly, as they have in the past, because there are fewer females and many of them are part of the working population.
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