China's One Child Policy

For centuries China has stood as a leading civilization, outpacing the rest of the world in the arts and sciences. On the other hand, over the last decade it has plummeted economically. A big factor for this massive downfall is the population of the country. China is overpopulated, at the dawn of this century there were some 426 million people living in China. Today the population is about 1.2 billion. About two-thirds of this 900 million-person increase was added within the last 50 years. In essence, the Mainland China alone contributes to at least twenty percent of the world's contribution. (Ogilvy 2000:97) The Chinese government realized that something had to be done or they would never be able to prosper as a country. Not at the rate they were heading, that's for sure. They decided to set up a plan to reduce the population growth. They called it China's one-child policy. This policy limits a Chinese couple to bearing only one child. (Milwertz 1997:56) Initially, the Chinese government adopted the policy in order to reduce the severe famine that plagued the country. They realized later that it would also help them prosper economically since the overpopulation held them back. The one child policy, although not formally written into law consisted of three main points. Advocating delayed marriage and delayed child bearing, advocating fewer and healthier births, and advocating one child per couple. (Wang 1995:34) Immediately after the policy was enforced, infanticide was introduced. How could a couple murder their child just because it was a female? Gender played a huge role in the Chinese culture. Males were definitely the dominant sex and a family without a male child was looked down at.

The Chinese tradition implied that there must be a boy among the children in order to continue the family. They felt that the males carried the name of their ancestors and they needed to carry the name for the next generation. Therefore, whenever a couple had a female child they reverted to infanticide. They would either abandon the child or even worse, kill it. This way they had another chance at getting a boy. As technologies advanced, they were able to determine the gender of the child before birth and used abortion as a means to eliminate a female birth. These wide uses of infanticide obviously arouse some issues. The sex ratio was totally unbalanced and the infant mortality rate was horrible. Males were completely dominant in China. They did most of the work and were the head of the household. The one concept that the Chinese people are not considering is that in the future there will be far too many males and far too less females. Sure, the one-child policy will reduce the population growth rate, but it might lower to a point where reproduction occurs very rarely. It is understandable though, because the family name is such a big concept to the Chinese and for it to be carried on is very important. (Clubb 1978:15) They take their cultural beliefs very seriously and will do anything to keep their ancestors happy. The fact of carrying their family name on to the next generation cannot be the only reason to kill off their female babies. Girls in China receive far less attention and resources than boys and are deemed an insignificant role in society.

There are always those women that do not really care whether they have a boy or girl, but it is their husbands who force them to abort the child. There have been several cases where a wife has been brutally beaten by her husband just so she would abort her child. (Wong 1995:3) The men take having a male child a lot more seriously than the women. In some cases the husband forces the wife to go into hiding when she is about to give birth. This way no one knows that she gave birth. Then if she has a girl, she can simply abandon it without anyone knowing. A lot of women have decided to apply for refugee status in other countries for fear that they will be forcibly aborted, sterilized and discriminated against.