Demographic Changes and Public Policy:

Analyzing Chinas One-Child Policy

HSB4U In-Class Assignment
Chinas dramatic population explosion during the 20th century influenced the
adoption of the One Child Policy. The numbers reveal its success as a scheme for
controlling population: there have been 400 million fewer people born in China
since the policy was introduced in 1979.
If this enough to call the policy a success? Read the articles provided to you and
decide for yourself. Answer the questions below using detailed points (point form
is acceptable). For each point you make, add a number next to it to indicate which
source you are using for that fact. Finally, write an opinion paragraph explaining
whether or not the policy was a success using selected pieces of evidence
explained to draw a conclusion.

1) What were the causes leading to the policy? (Why was it introduced in the
first place? What were its intended results?)
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2) What were the consequences from the policy (both positive and negative)?

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3) What changes were made / are being made to the policy? Why?

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4) What are the projected consequences of the policy? (What can we predict
about this trend in the future)

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5) Analyze the policy using one of the theories of social change or socialization
that we have learned. Use full sentences.

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6) Write an opinion paragraph explaining whether or not the One Child Policy
was a success. Use evidence from multiple articles, explain the evidence,
and then lead the reader to your conclusion. Use full sentences.
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2%
Knowledge

Thinking

100%
Considerable
evidence from all
7 sources is used
to provide a
comprehensive
view of the
policy.
Your opinion is
powerfully
expressed and
backed up by
multiple specific
pieces of
evidence wellexplained to
prove your
conclusion.

90%

80%

70%

60%

50%

Considerable
evidence from all
7 sources is used
to provide a clear
understanding of
the policy.

Considerable
evidence from at
least 5 sources is
used to provide a
clear
understanding of
the policy.

Specific evidence
from at least 5
sources is used
to provide a clear
understanding of
the policy.

Specific evidence
from at least 5
sources is used.

Evidence from at
least 5 sources is
used.

Your opinion is
peruasively
expressed and
backed up by
multiple specific
pieces of
evidence wellexplained to
prove your
conclusion.

Your opinion is
clearly expressed
and backed up
by multiple
specific pieces of
evidence wellexplained to
prove your
conclusion.

Your opinion is
clearly expressed
and backed up
by several
specific pieces of
evidence wellexplained to
prove your
conclusion.

Your opinion is
clearly expressed
and backed up
by multiple
pieces of
evidence that
implicitly prove
your conclusion.

Your opinion is
expressed and
backed up by
several pieces of
evidence that
implicitly prove
your conclusion

ARTICLE #1

Case study: China

BBC News, Managing Population Change
In the late 1970s, the Chinese government introduced a number of measures to reduce the country's birth
rate and slow the population growth rate. The most important of the new measures was a one-child
policy, which decreed that couples in China could only have one child.

In 1950 the rate of population change in China was 1.9 per cent each year. If this doesn't sound
high, consider that a growth rate of only 3 per cent will cause the population of a country to
double in less than 24 years!

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.

The one-child policy

The one-child policy, established in 1979, meant that each couple was allowed just one child. Benefits
included increased access to education for all, plus childcare and healthcare offered to families that
followed this rule.

Problems with enforcing the policy:

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.

In urban areas, the policy has been enforced strictly but remote rural areas have been harder to
control.

Many people claim that some women, who became pregnant after they had already had a child,
were forced to have an abortion and many women were forcibly sterilised. There appears to be
evidence to back up these claims.

Impact of the policy

The birth rate in China has fallen since 1979, and the rate of population growth is now 0.7 per
cent.

There have been negative impacts too - due to a traditional preference for boys, large numbers of
female babies have ended up homeless or in orphanages, and in some cases killed. In 2000, it
was reported that 90 per cent of foetuses aborted in China were female.

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.

Long-term implications
China's one-child policy has been somewhat relaxed in recent years. 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) and China faces new problems, including:

the falling birth rate - leading to a rise in the relative number of elderly people

fewer people of working age to support the growing number of elderly dependants - in the future
China could have an ageing population

ARTICLE #2

The war on baby girls: Gendercide

The Economist, Mar 4th 2010
IMAGINE you are one half of a young couple
expecting your first child in a fast-growing, poor
country. You are part of the new middle class;
your income is rising; you want a small family.
But traditional mores hold sway around you,
most important in the preference for sons over
daughters. Perhaps hard physical labour is still
needed for the family to make its living. Perhaps
only sons may inherit land. Perhaps a daughter
is deemed to join another family on marriage
and you want someone to care for you when you
are old. Perhaps she needs a dowry.
Now imagine that you have had an ultrasound
scan; it costs $12, but you can afford that. The
scan says the unborn child is a girl. You yourself
would prefer a boy; the rest of your family
clamours for one. You would never dream of
killing a baby daughter, as they do out in the
villages. But an abortion seems different. What
do you do?
For millions of couples, the answer is: abort the
daughter, try for a son. In China and northern
India more than 120 boys are being born for
every 100 girls. Nature dictates that slightly
more males are born than females to offset boys'
greater susceptibility to infant disease. But
nothing on this scale.
For those who oppose abortion, this is mass
murder. For those such as this newspaper, who
think abortion should be safe, legal and rare
(to use Bill Clinton's phrase), a lot depends on
the circumstances, but the cumulative
consequence for societies of such individual
actions is catastrophic. China alone stands to
have as many unmarried young menbare
branches, as they are knownas the entire

population of young men in America. In any

country rootless young males spell trouble; in

Asian societies, where marriage and children are
the recognised routes into society, single men
are almost like outlaws. Crime rates, bride
trafficking, sexual violence, even female suicide
rates are all rising and will rise further as the
lopsided generations reach their maturity.
It is no exaggeration to call this gendercide.
Women are missing in their millionsaborted,
killed, neglected to death. In 1990 an Indian
economist, Amartya Sen, put the number at
100m; the toll is higher now. The crumb of
comfort is that countries can mitigate the hurt,
and that one, South Korea, has shown the worst
can be avoided. Others need to learn from it if
they are to stop the carnage.
The dearth and death of little sisters
Most people know China and northern India
have unnaturally large numbers of boys. But
few appreciate how bad the problem is, or that it
is rising. In China the imbalance between the
sexes was 108 boys to 100 girls for the
generation born in the late 1980s; for the
generation of the early 2000s, it was 124 to 100.

In some Chinese provinces the ratio is an

unprecedented 130 to 100. The destruction is
worst in China but has spread far beyond. Other
East Asian countries, including Taiwan and
Singapore, former communist states in the
western Balkans and the Caucasus, and even
sections of America's population (Chinese- and
Japanese-Americans, for example): all these
have distorted sex ratios. Gendercide exists on
almost every continent. It affects rich and poor;
educated and illiterate; Hindu, Muslim,
Confucian and Christian alike.

Baby girls are thus victims of a malign

combination of ancient prejudice and modern
preferences for small families. Only one country
has managed to change this pattern. In the 1990s
South Korea had a sex ratio almost as skewed as
China's. Now, it is heading towards normality. It
has achieved this not deliberately, but because
the culture changed. Female education, antidiscrimination suits and equal-rights rulings
made son preference seem old-fashioned and
unnecessary. The forces of modernity first
exacerbated prejudicethen overwhelmed it.

Wealth does not stop it. Taiwan and Singapore

have open, rich economies. Within China and
India the areas with the worst sex ratios are the
richest, best-educated ones. And China's onechild policy can only be part of the problem,
given that so many other countries are affected.

But this happened when South Korea was rich.

If China or Indiawith incomes one-quarter
and one-tenth Korea's levelswait until they
are as wealthy, many generations will pass. To
speed up change, they need to take actions that
are in their own interests anyway. Most
obviously China should scrap the one-child
policy. The country's leaders will resist this
because they fear population growth; they also
dismiss Western concerns about human rights.
But the one-child limit is no longer needed to
reduce fertility (if it ever was: other East Asian
countries reduced the pressure on the population
as much as China). And it massively distorts the
country's sex ratio, with devastating results.
President Hu Jintao says that creating a
harmonious society is his guiding principle; it
cannot be achieved while a policy so profoundly
perverts family life.

In fact the destruction of baby girls is a product

of three forces: the ancient preference for sons;
a modern desire for smaller families; and
ultrasound scanning and other technologies that
identify the sex of a fetus. In societies where
four or six children were common, a boy would
almost certainly come along eventually; son
preference did not need to exist at the expense
of daughters. But now couples want two
childrenor, as in China, are allowed only one
they will sacrifice unborn daughters to their
pursuit of a son. That is why sex ratios are most
distorted in the modern, open parts of China and
India. It is also why ratios are more skewed after
the first child: parents may accept a daughter
first time round but will do anything to ensure
their nextand probably lastchild is a boy.
The boy-girl ratio is above 200 for a third child
in some places.
How to stop half the sky crashing down

And all countries need to raise the value of girls.

They should encourage female education;
abolish laws and customs that prevent daughters
inheriting property; make examples of hospitals
and clinics with impossible sex ratios; get
women engaged in public lifeusing
everything from television newsreaders to
women traffic police. Mao Zedong said women
hold up half the sky. The world needs to do
more to prevent a gendercide that will have the
sky crashing down.

ARTICLE #3

Easing of Chinas one-child policy has not produced a baby-boom

Washington Post, Simon Denver, February 6, 2015
When China declared it was relaxing its one-child
policy in late 2013, marketing director Kang Lu
talked to her husband about whether they wanted a
second baby. But given our current circumstances,
we quickly abandoned the idea, she said. It wasnt
a tough decision.
They werent alone. So far, a good number of
Chinese families have been less than enthusiastic
about the partial relaxation of the policy, choosing to
stick with one child, often for practical and
economic reasons, but also because decades of
government propaganda have convinced them that
one child really is best.
Experts say this only underlines a looming
demographic crisis in China: low fertility rates, a
rapidly ageing population and a shrinking labour
force will inevitably put immense strains on the
economy in the decades ahead, and on the
governments ability to pay peoples pensions. It is
so severe a problem, some experts predict it could
ultimately threaten the legitimacy of Communist
party rule.
Yet for many urban couples in modern China, having
a second child is not an attractive option. There are
no kindergartens here for children under three, while
the market for nannies is unregulated, and tales of
neglect are rife. Kangs parents had moved to
Beijing for three years to help look after their
daughter, but now felt too old to help.
Kang also has ambitions for her career, but was
faced with the prospect of giving up those ambitions
or giving up her job entirely to care for a second
child. In Beijings soaring housing market, Kang and
her husband couldnt afford a larger apartment,
which they figured they would need if they had a
boy. And they were worried that the capitals
smoggy air could affect a new babys health.

The joy and happiness my daughter brought us is

worth anything, she said. I am 36 and I know this
could be my last chance to have another baby. But I
very much doubt the joy of having another baby
would outweigh these practical obstacles. Besides, I
am an only child, she said. In my mind, one child
is good enough.
Chinas one-child policy successfully slowed the
countrys birth rate, but has led to new economic and
political concerns about an ageing population.
Photograph: Sutton-Hibbert/Rex Features
Chinas controversial one-child policy was
introduced in 1980 but partially relaxed just over a
year ago. Under the new rules, couples in China are
allowed a second child if either parent was an only
child. Rural couples can have a second if their first
child is a girl.
The policy was rolled out during 2014, with Beijing
one of the first provinces to relax the rules. Still,
only 6.7% of eligible couples in the capital applied
for permission to have a second child in the 10
months since the rules changed; nationally, take-up
has been higher, but with fewer than 1 million
couples applying it was still below government
forecasts.
The data reflects how a combination of the one-child
policy, rapid urbanisation and rising incomes have
dramatically reduced fertility rates in China. That
may have stabilised the population, but it has
brought in its wake a new set of problems. As its
population ages, China is racing toward a
demographic precipice, says Wang Feng, a
professor of sociology at the University of California
at Irvine.
The nations fertility rate, of 1.4 children per
woman, is way below that of the US and the
developed world average, and will lead inexorably
to a rapid ageing of society: that means a substantial

decline in the supply of labour to power the

economy, and a rapidly escalating number of old
people.
As the economy slows, government revenue growth
will slow, even as the financial burden from the
elderly rises. Sooner or later, he says, that means the
government will simply run out of money to pay for
pensions, or finance growing healthcare costs.
This challenges the legitimacy of the political
system, which claims to be able to do this kind of
thing, he says. And I am not talking about the long
and distant future I am really talking about the
next 10 or 15 years.
Chinas working population fell for a third straight
year in 2014, declining by 3.7 million to 916 million
people, according to data released last month, in a
trend that is expected to accelerate. Meanwhile, the
number of people aged 60 and above will approach
400 million, or a quarter of the population, in the
early 2030s, according to UN forecasts, from oneseventh now.
In December, a group of more than 50 leading
demographers came together in Shanghai to appeal
for further relaxation in family planning policy,
though experts say that even a total abandonment of
the one-child policy tomorrow would do nothing to
relieve the problem for decades.
Yet the government is dragging its feet, unable to
completely turn its back on a policy that has
empowered (and often enriched) thousands of often
corrupt officials for decades.
Mao Qunan, the chief spokesman for the
governments National Health and Family Planning
Commission, maintains that the size of Chinas
population is still a more pressing problem than the
fact that it is ageing. Those who say otherwise, he
said, have malicious intentions to damage the
Chinese government in the name of birth control.
Family planning policy would be relaxed further
over time, but the government had no timetable in

mind. Wang says the spokesman is deeply trapped

in the outdated belief in birth control. He complains
that incompetent, irresponsible and unaccountable
officials refuse to change a policy that has caused
untold misery and will soon have serious economic
and political consequences.
Birth rates in East Asia are generally low,
demographers point out, and an ageing population
has already emerged as a problem in Japan. In
China, families driving ambitions for their offspring
to succeed means many parents are happier to
concentrate on a single child.
My husband and I provide everything we can for
our daughter, Kang said. We pay for her to go to
her favourite ballet class. We plan to send her
overseas when she grows up. But if we had another
baby, I dont think we could do all this for both of
them.
In contrast, freelance writer Li Yue had a second
baby by accident. Conceived before the policy was
relaxed, she was lucky that the baby was born after
the rules changed, and she escaped a heavy fine. But
she still did not escape societys disapproval.
Many people have been brainwashed by one-child
policy propaganda, including my mum, she said.
When I told her I was having a second child, she
thought it was unacceptable. She didnt call me or
talk to me for a month.
Li said she was an only child, as were all of her six
cousins, and they all used to believe one child was
best.
Before my first daughter came into the world, I
only planned to have one baby. But when I saw my
daughter, the joy, the happiness made me want to
have more babies, she said. Now, my mum loves
my younger daughter very much. She has moved to
our place to help look after her. And she has even
started to persuade other people to have a second
child.

ARTICLE #4

The impact of China's one-child policy in four graphs

29 October 2015, Alberto Nardelli and Glenn Swann, The Guardian
China has scrapped its one-child policy. Here are four graphs that show the impact the policy, which was
introduced in 1980, has had on Chinas population.

1) Population growth has slowed down

Data from the United
Nations shows that
population growth,
measured as the crude
birth rate minus the
crude death rate, has
gone from about 15
per 1,000 people in
1980 to below 5.5 per
1,000 people today.

2) The working
age population is
shrinking
The proportion of Chinas
1.37 billion people who are
aged 15-64 has started to
shrink in recent years.
The drop has been even
greater among those
between 15 and 59, the
measure the Chinese government uses. It fell to 915.8 million last year, down 3.7 million from 2013, a
trend that is expected to continue.

3) The age dependency ratio is, in turn, increasing

One consequence of an
ageing population has been
the increase in parallel of
the proportion of people
dependent on those of
working age.
The rise in the old age
dependency ratio the
ratio between people older
than 64 to the working-age
population has been
particularly acute.

4) Demographics
have been skewed
One consequence of the one-child
policy is that it has led to a
substantial gender imbalance in
China.
UN data reveals that there are
currently 106 males for every 100
females in China above the
world total for the same measure
(102) and well above nearly every
other country in the world.
At 120 boys for every 100 girls, the ratio among newborns is the highest in the world. If the current
trend continues, there will not be enough brides for as many as one-fifth of todays baby boys when they
get to marrying age, according to analysis by Nomura.

ARTICLE #5
Understanding China's Former One Child Policy
Wendy Connett, Investopedia, October 29, 2015

Chinas one-child policy has probably gotten the

spotlight as much as the size of its population,
the worlds largest at almost 1.4 billion. The
goal of the policy was to make sure that
population growth did not outpace economic
development and to ease environmental and
natural resource challenges and imbalances
caused by a rapidly expanding population.
It was initially meant to be a temporary
measure, and is estimated to have prevented up
to 400 million births since it was instituted.
Some 36 years later, the government-mandated
policy was formally ended with little fanfare on
Oct. 29, 2015 after its rules had been slowly
relaxed to allow more couples fitting certain
criteria to have a second child. Now, all couples
can have two children.
The reason for ending the policy for all Chinese
citizens is purely demographical: too many
Chinese are heading into retirement and the
nation's population has too few younger people
entering the labor force to provide for their
retirement, healthcare and continued economic
growth. About 30% of China's population is
over the age of 50 and the number of workers
entering Chinas overall labor force has been
declining for the last three years, a trend that is
expected to accelerate.
History

The one-child policy was introduced in 1979 by

Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping to curb Chinas
rapidly growing population. At the time it was
approximately 970 million.
When introduced, the policy mandated that Han
Chinese, the ethnic majority, could only have

one child. In the early 1980s China relaxed the

policy to allow couples to have a second child if
each parent are both only children. Exceptions
also include couples that live in rural china and
ethnic minorities with a small population.
The years leading up to the policy followed the
founding of The Peoples Republic of China.
After years of unrest, medical care and
sanitation improved and China's population
began to grow. At the time this was seen an
economic boon for a country that was
transforming into an industrial nation from an
agricultural one.
By the 1950s, population growth started to
outpace the food supply, and the government
started promoting birth control. Following Mao
Zedongs Great Leap Forward in 1958, a plan to
rapidly modernize Chinas economy, a
catastrophic famine ensued which resulted in the
deaths of tens of millions of Chinese.
In the wake of the famine the government
continued to promote family planning, such as
postponing having children and using birth
control. This was derailed temporarily by the
upheaval caused by the Cultural Revolution in
1966. By the late 1960s, the government began
stepping up family planning campaigns, and by
the mid-1970s it introduced the family planning
slogan "Late, Long and Few."
Incentives or rewards for families who adhere to
the one-child policy include better employment
opportunities, higher wages and government
assistance. Those who dont are subject to fines,
and access to government assistance and
employment opportunities can become difficult.

Easing of Policy

In late 2013, as part of a package of social,

economic and legal reforms, the Chinese
government amended the one-child policy to
allow couples to have a second child if either
parent instead of both is an only child. The
change started rolling out throughout China at
the beginning of this year.
Through September 2014, 800,000 couples have
applied to have a second child, according to the
China Daily newspaper, which cited statistics
from Chinas government run National Health
and Family Planning Commission.
It had been estimated that 11 million couples
were eligible and that half would eventually
apply. One issue preventing Chinese couples
from having a second child is that many of them
live in cities, where the cost of living is high
enough to dissuade them an issue also faced
by couples in the West.
Gender Imbalance

One of the unintended side effects of the onechild policy is that China is now the most
gender-imbalanced country in the world due to a
cultural preference for male offspring. This has
resulted in the practice of couples opting to
abort female fetuses. Abortion is legal in China,
although sex-selective abortion is not.
The gender ratio in China is 117.6 boys for
every 100 girls born. Some researchers estimate

that there will be approximately 30 million more

young men than women in China by 2020. This
means millions of Chinese men may not be able
to find wives.
Aging Population

Chinas one-child policy had been successful in

lowering its birth rate, which has declined since
the 1990s to an average of 1.5, which means on
average women give birth to 1.5 children. This
also means it's now faced with an aging
population, who rely on their children to support
them when they are elderly and no longer
working. It's estimated that by 2030 a quarter of
the population will be over 60 years old.
Shrinking Workforce

Population control had also resulted in a

shrinking work force. Chinas labor force has
been on the decline since 2012. In 2013 it fell
by more than 2.4 million. The increasing elderly
population and decreasing labor force was the
impetus for the relaxation and ending of the one
child policy.
The Bottom Line

Chinas one-child policy is estimated to have

prevented up to 400 million births since it was
instituted 35 years ago. In the wake of an aging
population and shrinking labor force, the policy
was first relaxed to allow a second child for
many young couples, and then ended formally
in October 2015.

ARTICLE #6

A cruel trade
Staff Writer, The Economist, Jan 26th 2013

THE Chinese new year, which this year falls on February 10th, is a time of family reunions. But Xiao
Chaohua is preparing to spend his sixth new year without his son, who was abducted in 2007 by
suspected child traffickers. Chinas one-child policy has fuelled demand for children like his, thousands
of whom are snatched and sold every year to desperate, usually boy-less, couples. Spurred by the
campaigning of parents like Mr Xiao, the government is starting to acknowledge the practice more
openly. But curbing it is proving tough.
Mr Xiao has been trying the hard way to raise awareness of the crime; driving around the country in a
minivan covered with posters of missing children. One of them features his son, then five years old,
dressed up for a school photograph in a white jacket with red lapels (see picture). Mr Xiao, who lives in
a village near Tongzhou, one of Beijings satellite towns, says he has spent as much as 400,000 yuan
($64,300) of his own money on the project. He says there are other parents elsewhere in China who tour
the country in similarly bedecked vehicles.
The authorities have launched several crackdowns over the past two decades, but the crime has
persisted. Since a renewed effort began in 2009, more than 54,000 children have been rescued and
11,000 trafficking gangs smashed, Xinhua, the state news-agency, reported in December. Officials
claim the problem has become less rampant.

Given the patchiness of official data, this is hard to prove. Individual cases of abduction are rarely
reported by the state-controlled media. But Deng Fei, a Beijing-based journalist and prominent
campaigner on behalf of victims and their families, believes the number of children being abducted is
falling. Mr Xiao estimates that the price of abducted boys has risen in recent years from around 40,000
yuan to about 90,000, perhaps because the supply of abducted children has been affected by the police
crackdown.
Social media may also have played a role. In recent years, parents and activists have been using websites
and microblogs to share information about cases and draw public attention to child abduction. Their
efforts have put pressure on the police, who have responded (unusually, given their suspicion of internet
activism) by using the internet themselves to contact the families of victims.
The police official in charge of anti-trafficking, Chen Shiqu, has an account on Sina Weibo, one of
Chinas most popular microblog services. Its main page shows a cartoon drawing of him, cuddling a
rescued baby. Have mobilised to verify, he wrote on January 23rd in response to a message from
another microblogger about a missing child. His account has 3.4m followers. Mr Deng, the journalist,
has 2.8m people who follow his microblog, which he uses to help return rescued children to their
parents. An account on Sina Weibo run by Baobei Huijia (Baby Come Home), an activist network based
in north-eastern China, has nearly 140,000 followers. Mr Chen, the policeman, is a keen follower of the
activists work, say the Chinese media. Zhang Zhiwei, a lawyer who helps Baobei Huijia, says the public
security ministry has encouraged police to join internet groups that discuss child abductions and engage
with members openly. This is a novelty for the publicity-shy police. China Youth Daily, a Beijing
newspaper, reported that Mr Chen began his online outreach under the pseudonym Volunteer 007, but
his mastery of the subject had soon led to his identity being revealed.
Mr Xiao, the parent, believes the authorities could be doing a lot more. Buyers of abducted children still
often get away without punishmentthey usually live in villages and sometimes enjoy protection from
local officials. He says orphanages sometimes fail to take DNA from children they receive. This can be
used to look for matches with DNA records held by anti-trafficking police. The absence of such checks
allows traffickers to sell children to orphanages, which can then offer them for adoption at high fees.

ARTICLE #7

One-child policy: China's army of little emperors

Steve Connor, the Independent, January 11, 2013
They were known as Chinas little emperors
the offspring of one-child families born after the
countrys draconian family planning policy was
introduced in 1979. They became the spoilt
generation of teenagers who didnt experience
the joys and heartache of sibling rivalry or share
and share alike at least this was the simplistic
stereotype of the singleton children born in
modern China, based on little more than
anecdote and hearsay.

and less conscientious than the Chinese who

were born just before the policy, they claimed.

But now, scientists have produced the first

convincing evidence to suggest that the onechild generation of China has indeed become a
rather maladjusted lot.
The one-child policy came about after a rapid
growth in the Chinese population in the 1950s
and 1960s. It was strictly enforced in urban
areas, with reports of forced abortions and
sterilisations, as well as heavy financial and
social penalties for those who dared to
transgress the one-child law.
Chinese authorities claimed the policy was a
great success, preventing more than 250 million
births between 1980 and 2000 and helping to set
the country on the right demographic track for
its spectacular economic growth.
However, more than 30 years after it began, an
unintended consequence has emerged; it has
fundamentally changed the psychology of
young Chinese men and women, scientists said.
Chinese children born after the policy have
grown up to become less altruistic and trusting,
more timid, less competitive, more pessimistic

The study has broken new ground by analysing

the attitudes of young Chinese adults using
games designed by economists to test behaviour
and intentions, such as whether the subjects are
likely to share something with a stranger or are
ready to trust someone they do not know.
When the scientists compared two age groups
born a few years before the policy was
introduced, with two age groups born just after,
they were surprised to find such marked

differences in the kind of personality traits

which influence social relationships, that could
have important ramifications for Chinas future.
We find quite large impacts. Those who are the
only children as a result of the policy are
considerably less trusting, less trustworthy,
more risk averse, less competitive, more
pessimistic, less conscientious and possibly also
more neurotic, said Lisa Cameron, of Monash
University in Melbourne, Australia. These
behavioural impacts could have economic
consequences in addition to the more obvious
social implications.
For instance, we find that those born under the
policy are less likely to be employed in risky
occupations, such as self-employment,
freelancing or the financial sector. So it may be
that the one-child policy generation will be less
entrepreneurial, she said.
The study analysed 421 individuals born just a
few years before and a few years after the 1979
policy, which resulted in a dramatic decline of
large families. In 1975, just 27 per cent of
Chinese families consisted of only one child,
whereas it was nearly 91 per cent in 1983.
The scientists asked the volunteers, now in their
20s and 30s, to carry out a series of economics
games designed to test features of their
personality, using real money as an incentive.
The dictator game measured altruism, the
risk game tested boldness and the
competition game looked at rivalry.
Economic experiments have the advantage of
allowing the researcher to observe particular,
well-defined types of behaviour, Dr Cameron
said.

Experimental participants are also incentivised

with money, the amount of which depends on
the decision made in the experiment, which,
experimental economists argue, provides a
greater motivation for participants to reveal their
true preferences, she explained.
What became clear, the scientists say in their
study published in the journal Science, is that
one-child offspring suffer from what they term
sibling deprivation, meaning that a lack of
brothers or sisters appeared to make them more
self-centred, less co-operative and less likely to
get along with their peer group.
Previous work on one-child families in the
West, where parents have largely chosen to have
just one baby, have found little differences in
behaviour between them and the offspring of
larger families. What was different here was the
ability to look at a whole society where parents
were coerced into having no more than one
child.
This was like a huge natural experiment that
allowed the scientists to distinguish between
growing up as an only child in a one-child
society, and being an only child in societies
where parents had the choice, Dr Cameron said.
On paper, singleton children should have an
advantage in that they have the full attention of
their parents and do not have to compete with
siblings. But, in practice, the findings suggest
that singletons may have missed out on the
rough and tumble and give and take of growing
up with other children of about the same age.
As one commentator noted: Perhaps the
biggest surprise of the study is how thoroughly
the only-child subjects lived up to their bad
reputation.