What has the Chinese government done to control its huge amount of population effectively?

Essay by stephenlee_nz May 2004

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What has the Chinese government done to control its huge amount of population effectively?

There are 6 billion people live on this planet and more than one fifth of them are Chinese. The current situation of Chinese population is that about one billion Chinese still living on traditional agriculture, and most Chinese live in the east part of China. The population is a very serious problem for China, although the birth rate in China has been reduced, however, because of the huge population, the net increase per year is still about 20 million, equal to the whole population of Australia.( http://www.chinapop.gov.cn/population/population_detail.asp?populationID=1534) However, Chinese population did not always increase fast. About 2000BC, the population in China already achieved 13 million, but it increased very slowly during the next thousand years. It took 4000 years for China's population to reach 100 million, but when China went in to the 20th century, the Chinese population increased nearly six times that number.

(http://www.cpirc.org.cn/5cendata12.htm )

This essay focuses on the changes of Chinese political policies during 1949 to nowadays to show readers how the Chinese government did efforts to control its huge population effectively.

In 1949, China finished its civic war and united its own country the Peoples' Republic of China. At that time there were 600 million people living 9.6 million square kilometers. Poverty and underdevelopment forced Chinese leaders to use traditional ways to develop our country, mainly human labour. However, Chinese leaders thought that 600 million people were not enough to develop such a huge country, and they also wanted to rebuild the country from war ruins as soon as possible. The Chinese government decided to encourage women to have multiple-pregnancies in order for more working hands to rebuild the country (http://www.cpirc.org.cn/know19.htm).

From the 1950s to early 1970s, the Chinese population increased...