Book Description

Since the early 1970s, China has made diligent efforts to end the country's "reproductive anarchy." To keep the total population within 1.2 billion by 2000, the revolutionarily unique policy of "one child per couple" has emerged as the family-size ideal. This policy is explicitly fair in both principle and procedure, but does generate problems as it reduces population growth. This paper reviews and assesses the misgivings and reservations of the critics and examines the major ramifications of the confrontation between society and the family implicit in China's population planning programs. The analysis goes beyond the commonly noted issues of old age, security, infanticide, and the "marriage squeeze" to speculate on how the policy of minimal reproduction will affect the life cycle of women. Will women be more able to contemplate and conduct their life in different terms? What will be the nature of married life when sex and reproduction become separated under this policy? The policy of minimal reproduction devalues women as mothers but simultaneously makes men unnecessary beyond their first or second impregnation. Will this not mean the ultimate emancipation of women? Answers to these questions must await the passage of time, but the behavioral and sociological impact of the one child policy or even two-child ideal should be considered with much more imagination and foresight than at present.