After 35 years of allowing each family to have just one child, China has finally dropped the one-child-policy that was implemented in a bid to restrict its population growth.
The one-child-policy was launched by Deng Xiaoping in 1979, in the hope that it would limit the amount of resources used in China, thus enabling the country to become completely modernized by the year 2000.
Due to China’s traditional preference for sons, a bias shared by most Asian countries, the introduction of the one-child-policy led to an increasingly poor treatment of baby girls. Many horror stories, some of which are unfortunately true, circulated about Chinese baby girls being abandoned because their parents would prefer to have a son.
Although discovering the sex of a baby prior to its birth is prohibited in China, it has been reported that it was not uncommon for soon-to-be parents to send blood samples overseas in a bid to determine their baby’s sex. It was then common practice for women to abort their unborn babies if it was discovered that they were female.
The increased numbers of parents aborting and abandoning their female children has, not surprisingly, resulted in a huge gender imbalance in China. According to figures released last year, approximately 118 boys are born in comparison to every 100 girls in China. Initially, this may not seen like a great deal, however, over the course of 35 years, this has resulted in there being 33 million more men than women in China alone.
This means there are 700 million men, but only 667 million women currently inhabiting China and, as you can probably imagine, this has created social and economical problems across the country that many fear it is too late to rectify.
Although the one-child-policy has been abolished, China’s official media have said that all couples are now able to have two children, demonstrating that the Chinese government still have some concerns over the population and are still enforcing restrictions over something that should really be dependent on personal choice.
Featured Image by Ross Pollack via Flickr, available under a Creative Commons License.
