During the past thirty years, a controversial policy, China's one-child policy, has been considered against human rights by many western countries. As a coin has two sides, China, having launched the policy for 26 years, has accomplished the goal as the slogan "control population and enhance people's living standard"; meanwhile, along with the achievement of the policy, some disharmonic phenomena have emerged at the beginning of the 21st century. This essay introduces briefly the background of China's one-child policy in the 1st section, and then discusses the advantages and disadvantages of China's one-child policy in section 2 and section 3. In the end it gives some solutions for its problems.
1. Policy BackgroundIn the eleven years of the industrial revolution from 1954-1965 and the decade of Cultural Revolution from 1966-1976, China population sharply increased under the first-generation leader Chairman Mao's idea of "the more people, the stronger we are" (Xi 2006: 5).
China, Shibangou Bridge underpass, Fuling, Yan...
English: Scatter graph of the People's Republic of...
"Please for the sake of your country, use birth co...The government encouraged people to bear children as many as possible in order to replace energy crisis with human resources. Millions of babies were born in the two decades; that is the first China's baby boom in modern China.
After the society disorder of the 10-year Cultural Revolution, China became a worldwide market-oriented economic newcomer in 1977. The government carried out comprehensive series of economic reform policies for attracting foreign investment and domestic consumption; as a result, economy began to revive. At the same time, the second period of baby boom landed in China, for the baby boomers of 1950s and 1960s came to their marriage and procreation ages. Comparing the growth rate of economy and population, the whole society of China, consequently, had to deal with the pressure of the conflict between overpopulation and economic recovery.
The government, led by the second-generation leaders, realized that the...