Tuesday 27 January 2015

One-Child Policy

Aim: Reduce the country's birth rate thus, slowing the population growth rate

Establishment: 1979

Background Info:  (1950) Population growth: 1.9%/year
Previous Chinese governments had encouraged people to have a lot of children to increase the country's workforce. But by the 1970s the government realised that current rates of population growth would soon become unsustainable.

Problems:
-Those who had more than one child didn't receive these benefits and were fined.
-The policy was keenly resisted in rural areas, where it was traditional to have large families.
-Women who became pregnant after they had already had a child, were forced to have an abortion  with many forcibly fertilized

Impacts:
-Rate of population growth: 0.7 per cent%/year
-Due to a traditional preference for boys, large numbers of female babies have ended up homeless or in orphanages, and in some cases killed. As a result, the gender balance of the Chinese population has become distorted. Today, it is thought that men outnumber women by more than 60 million.

Current Changes:
-Couples can now apply to have a second child if their first child is a girl, or if both parents are themselves only-children.
While China's population is now rising more slowly, it still has a very large total population (1.3 billion in 2008)

New Problems:
-Falling birth rate; leading to a rise in the relative number of elderly people(ageing population)

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