Using Punishment to Control Population Overgrowth

— A Case Study of China’s One-Child Policy

China, a country that once used probably the most radical and coercive effort to control its overgrowing population growth, represents the use of punishment for managing population growth. In the 1970s, the fertility rate was as high as 7.51, meaning a woman would give birth to more than 7 children during her childbearing years.¹ Fearing that the economic development of the country could not match the rapid population growth, the government decided to adopt family planning policies in the late 1970s. In 1982, family planning was formally written into the Constitution and considered a "basis national policy" of the state, leading to the implementation of the “one-child policy” for more than thirty years.

Evaluating the Policy: Short Term Sucess, Long Term Trauma

PBS, "One Child Nation."⁹

Second, the one-child policy was implemented within the context of a deeply gendered society, and the policy never addressed the gendered norms that were already in place. With a strong preference given to sons and coupled with the development of sex-selective technologies during pregnancy, the policy further entrenched these norms.⁴. The one-child policy therefore led to selective abortion and the abandonment of girls. Upon twenty years of implementation, the male-to-female ratio increased to 121 in 2005.⁵ This not only reinforced the situation of gender inequality in China, but also created long-lasting impacts on the demographics of the country, and is potentially a factor that contributes to the current declining population growth in China, as studies have suggested that a higher share of women can result in higher population growth.⁶ Therefore, although China’s one-child policy did control its population growth effectively over the last thirty years, its success should be rejected and not considered worthy of replicating when its direct violations of women’s fundamental rights, its exacerbation of gendered norms, and its long-lasting impacts on widening the gender ratio of the country are taken into account.

BBC, "The China Crisis: The One-Child Policy," 2019.⁷

At first, China’s thirty-year-long one-child policy seemed to be a great success in terms of controlling the country’s population overgrowth. Indeed, between the late 1970s and 2016, the population growth rate decreased from 1.47% to 0.573%, with the fertility rate dropping from 7.51 to 1.67.² However, a closer examination of the policy actually shows that it should not be considered a pure success. First, the successful implementation of the one-child policy came at the cost of significant violations of women’s fundamental rights. The fines for having a second child were set extremely high. Fearing that they could be held accountable for not implementing the top-down agenda successfully, officials resorted to efforts as extreme as forced abortion for women who were pregnant and could not afford the fines.³ Women’s bodily autonomy was far from reality; they were dragged out of their houses, and the fetuses were pulled out of their bodies, leaving them with both mental and physical trauma.

Data Commons,"China Fertility Rate," 2023.⁸