Gallery | 79 : Single Child Policy Poster

Government poster extolling the virtues of late marriage and having a single child.

Birth control in China was a feature of the Communist government of China from the 1960s.

The root cause was a very high increase in the population after the end of the Civil War in 1949. The population rose from about 400 million to about 750 million in 1975. This rate of increase was unsustainable as there was insufficient food to feed the people. In the 1950s millions died from starvation, partly as a result of enforced creation of misconceived commune based agricultural collectives. This is less of a concern now that China has the monetary reserves to import food in exchange for income from manufactured goods. The population growth rate has now reduced to about 4% but the total has already grown to 1,300 million. Individual provinces have populations of over 100 million (or about twice the population of France or the UK).

The main reason that led to the large increase was improved sanitation and healthcare.

The government introduced the one child policy as a way of reducing the growth, it was effective in cities but less so in the countryside where producing a large family was the only way that a farming family could guarantee sufficient labour to work the fields. The policy was backed by education schemes and hefty tax incentives. In some cases sterilization of women after three children had been born was enforced. Chinese culture places great store on a male successor to continue the family line, and so the one child policy has caused great strain on families when a daughter rather than a son is born. Currently there is concern that modern techniques to determine sex early has led to selective abortion of female foetuses and consequently considerably more boys than girls are now being born.

The environmental footprint of this huge population has been mitigated up to now by the low per capita income, with increased wealth and consumerism the population will inevitably have a greater impact on the environment both internally and globally. Recently, the global price of oil has risen at least partly due to the rapid increase in demand from China.

This archive photograph was taken by a SACU member in the early 1980s.