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.