ONE child policy essay*

The Planned Birth policy (Simplified Chinese: 计划生育; pinyin: jìhuà shēngyù) is the birth control policy of the government of the People's Republic of China (PRC). It is known in Western society as the One-child Policy due to the required payment of a "social compensation fee" for couples having more than one child in urban areas. China's generally perceived pandemic overpopulation problem, with the associated social and environmental problems, stimulated the government to take strong unique measures in population planning policy. The policy is controversial both within and outside China due to allegations of extreme methods such as forced abortions and other human rights abuses by the local authorities.


[edit] Overview The term "one-child policy" is based on a popular misconception that the birth control policy of the PRC requires all couples in mainland China to have no more than one child. In reality, though having one child has been promoted as ideal and the limit has been strongly enforced in urban areas, the actual implementation varies from location to location.[1] In most rural areas, families are allowed to have two children, if the first child is female, or disabled.[2] Second children are subject to birth spacing (usually 3 or 4 years). Additional children may result in fines. The families are required to pay economic penalties, and might be denied bonuses at their workplace.

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The Danshan, Sichuan Province Nonguang Village Public Affairs Bulletin Board in September 2005 noted that RMB 25,000 in social compensation fees were owed in 2005. Thus far 11,500 RMB had been collected leaving another 13,500 RMB to be collected. The social fostering or maintenance fee [shehui fuyang fei] sometimes called in the West a family planning fine, is collected as a multiple of either the annual disposable income of city dwellers or the annual cash income of peasants as determined each year by the local statistics office. The fine for a child born above the birth quota that year is thus a multiple of, depending upon the locality, either urban resident disposable income or peasant cash income estimated that year by the local statistics. So a fine for a child born ten years ago is based about the income estimate for the year of the child's birth and not of the current year.[3] They also have to pay for both the children to go to school and all the family's health care. Some children who are in one-child families pay less than the children in other families. The one child policy was designed from the outset to be a one generation policy.[4] Some cities such as Beijing permit two "only child" parents to have two children.
Moreover, in accordance with PRC's affirmative action policies towards ethnic minorities, all non-Han ethnic groups are subjected to different rules and are usually allowed to have two children in urban areas, and three or four in rural areas; in addition, some couples simply pay a fine, or "social maintenance fee" to have more children.[5] Thus the overall fertility rate of mainland China is, in fact, closer to two children per family than to one child per family (1.8). The steepest drop in fertility occurred in the 1970s before one child per family was implemented in 1979. This is due to the fact that population policies and campaigns have been ongoing in China since the 1950s. During the 1970s, a campaign of 'One is good, two is OK and three is too many' was heavily promoted.
Recently, the policy has changed because the long period of sub-replacement fertility caused population ageing and negative population growth in some areas,[6] and improvements in education and the economy have caused more couples to become reluctant to have children.