Skip to main content

China’s One-Child Policy: A Solution or a Problem


            Susan Scutti, in her article “One Child Policy is One Big Problem for China” published in Newsweek Global on January 24, 2014, discusses the thirty-five years of China’s official policy regarding of female infanticide and the primary reason for the government making this law.  From 1949 to 1979, the year this law was started, China’s population grew from 542 million to 975 million.  With an increase in birth rates the government was concerned there would be insufficient resources if its population continued to increase.  
            China has a long-standing cultural bias against females.  Males are expected to take care of elderly parents so parents desire male babies.  There are stories of parents killing female babies. Even in 2005 the government continued this official anti-female bias by associating female babies with disabled babies as a reason to allow a second child.  According to Scutti, “This pairing of ‘girl’ and ‘disabled’ is hardly an accident.  Masculinity is the crux of Chinese society – sons not only carry on the family line, they also expected to provide for their parents in old age … The social message: Survival depends on sons, and daughters are only a burden.”  Scutti explains that there were economic realities associated with the one-child policy.  China did not anticipate the devastating consequences of this policy.  Rural areas resisted the policy.  Neighbors would inform the government if they knew someone had a second child. Some parents would use ultra sound to detect the sex of the baby and if it were a female, the parents would abort it. The most significant consequence was the large disparity of males to females.   The normal male to female ratio worldwide is 103-106 males for every 100 females. But by 2005, the ratio in China had increased to 121 and 130 in some rural areas.  This resulted in a large number of males (12-15%) who cannot marry since there are not enough females.   
            In 2005 China modified many policies, allowing some parents to have multiple babies, preventing discrimination against single males, providing incentives for females to attend college, making sex-based abortions illegal, increasing policing actions against female sex trafficking from other Asian countries, and spending millions of dollars researching the implication of the gender disparity.  Scutti concludes, “Dealing with the profound and far-reaching devastation caused by the policy, however, will take many years to fix.  If it can be fixed.”   China’s modification of the one-child policy has the potential to change not only the economy, but also China’s infrastructure. 
As a Chinese I believe Scutti’s writing causes misunderstandings of what really happened and why. Because she did not explain the historical background of China, her readers cannot fully understand why China made that law.  The article did not talk about the impact on employment.  It focused only on gender disparity.  In the larger cities in China, as the people retire, there are too few people to replace them. The reasons she stated for the one-child policy are true. Without the one-child policy, China would have remained a poor and backward country.  Today’s news is full of stories of China’s new economic power due to the one-child policy.  While there were many bad things about the policy, which China is trying to fix, overall it allowed China to modernize its society and economy. 




Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Native American Boarding School: DESTROYING a Culture

Bickford-Duane, Pauline , in his article “ DESTROYING a Culture ” published in the magazine Cobblestone on Jan 2015, discusses about how US Government took land and broke treaties with Native Americans.  Then they tried to make them like white people, But later US Government learned that was a bad idea.  So, they gave Native Americans back a lot of rights such as the ability to governed themselves, attend their own schools, and learn their language. Photographs from the Carlisle Indian School show a group of Sioux boys shortly after their arrival at the school (ABOVE) and a group of “assimilated” Sioux students (OPPOSITE). The author first wrote a short history of how the United States government tried to take over Native American culture. She said the government had tried for almost 100 years and over 400 agreements to find a “solution” to the Native American “problem”. But most of them were not successful. then in the late 1800s, Senator Dawes prop...
1 comment
Read more

Arranged marriages: A prisoner in the house

          Shackle, Samira, in his article “ A Prisoner in the House ” published in the magazine New Internationalist on November 2013, discuss about two Indian women, Jasminder and Mandeep and why they became slaves in a dark life in Britain because of arranged marriages. how badly their foreign spouses and family treated them and who help them. No way out: every year, some 500 South Asian women are forced into domestic slavery in Britain following an arranged marriage.           First the author talked about 19 years old India girl Jasminder’s family background and her family think their daughter will have better life in Britain. Sometimes families must sell many home assets for the dowry.   So, the daughters feel they must go since their family has sacrificed so much.   But when they arrive in their new country, all is not like they think. All of the family people trea...
Post a Comment
Read more

Microhome Assignment – Unflattening Heroism

Microhome Assignment – Unflattening Heroism Zeno Franco and Philip Zimbardo in their article “A Prisoner in the House” show how we are all capable of everyday heroism. They argued many heroes are like evildoers.   They acted that way because of the situation they were in.   They explain different way to show what is heroism; what makes a hero and how to nurture the heroic imagination. The prison and student-teacher experiments showed how a situation can change peoples’ behaviors, Thesis that some people believe is that people act “good” only because they have never been coerced or seduced to do “bad”. What about the observers of evil but who do nothing to stop it. We focus on the evil doers, and not on the silent majority who observe or who are aware of the evil. heroism could have the same theory. That it is the situation, and not the person, that creates the hero.   And like the silent majority to evil, there is a silent majority to heroism, since they assume oth...
Post a Comment
Read more